In a link building campaign, when a link is placed on a site that points to another site, Google is being advised to return the page we linked to among its search results for that keyword. But do all of these tips carry the same weight? Obviously not and now let's see why.

Let's assume we have a plant in the garden that clearly needs care. At this point we will need an agronomist who would take care of it and who would give us advice on how to proceed. So talking to two friends who come to see me to do some work around the house, they recommend an agronomist acquaintance of theirs. One friend is a plumber, the other friend is a gardener.

Honestly, between the two, I automatically think that my gardener friend's advice is more credible, because, being a gardener, he is more in line with his job, unlike his plumber friend.

A little time passes and I realize that the plant is too neglected and a quick intervention is needed. An old agronomist friend who I hadn't heard from in a while comes to mind and I decide to call him. Unfortunately however, due to work commitments he is not in Italy, but abroad and he could not join me for a couple of months. However, he recommends the name of a collaborator of his, very good and experienced, who could help me with my problem, an agronomist.

Going back to the previous example between the gardener friend, the plumber friend and the agronomist friend, I feel safer in relying on the advice of the latter, precisely because it is an agronomist who is advising me on another agronomist.

Precisely because of a question of perceptions, the advice of an agronomist who advises another agronomist is automatically more credible, therefore more authoritative. Google thinks the same way.

Google is able to catalog thousands of websites by organizing them into reference topics. Precisely thanks to this cataloging it is able to distinguish relevant links from irrelevant or even off-topic ones.

Less relevant links have less value and transfer less authority to the target site. Otherwise, the more relevant the sending site, the more authority it transfers, by means of the high authority of the sender site.

The authority of a website is measured in the specific context of the main topic. Google, by identifying the topic of websites, can compare them and decide who is more authoritative than the others, creating its own sector ranking.

Let's go into a little more detail

Every page on the web has an authority score which is determined by various factors, such as number of backlinks, on-page SEO optimization, how important it is for search engines, etc. This value is not visible, it is simply an X value that Google, through its algorithm, assigns for its cataloging.

When a link is placed from site A to site B, the authority is copied over the link. By increasing the amount of authority of site B's page, the possibility of scaling the serps increases.

Now imagine having a bucket with water, lots of water and connecting the two buckets via a small tube. The first bucket containing a lot of water is site page A and the water is the authority; the tube is the link and the empty bucket is the page of site B. Basically, part of the water is poured from the first bucket to the second bucket. Why "part of the water" and not all? Because it is very difficult to have a page with only one link, but several, therefore the water, therefore the authoriy, is distributed for the number of outgoing links.

Is authority poured in exactly the same way for all links?

It would seem that the further up the outbound link is on the page, the more authority is transferred to the target page. As links are placed in subsequent paragraphs, less authority is transferred.

When I talk about links I don't mean the ones for example on the menu, footer, sidebar, etc because those links are considered much less. Precisely because they are not included in a "content" and above all because they are repeated on all the pages of the site. There is even still someone who exchanges links, i.e. this agreement takes place between webmasters, where "I link you and you link me", but it is useless, because it is a clear agreement to try to gain some position in the SERPs, without carry any value via link. These embarrassing situations, which is very 90s, you can find them on the sidebar of some sites under "friend sites" or "useful links".

How to know the authority of a website?

There are several ways to get an idea of ​​how authoritative a website is. If you are in the sector, I assume you have one or more dedicated software accounts active which, through their internal algorithm, can estimate the value of a domain for you. The most common ones are SeoZoom, SemRush, Ahrefs, Majestic, etc., obviously for a fee. These same softwares quickly give you the possibility of having a fairly complete picture of the life of a website and, as you can imagine, you can also check its progress, behavior and many useful details of your own competitors.

If you are a beginner and prefer to use a free tool for the moment, you can use the free tool from Moz which gives you an indicative overview of the life of a website https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ where, by entering the name of a site, you can already have some idea about the authority of the website.

Or you can download the Moz Toolbar which gives you the authority values ​​for both the site (DA = Domain Authority) and for each web page (PA = Page Authority).

The true value of authority

You cannot know the true value of a website's authority. Only Google knows it, which it obviously keeps secret, just as it keeps its algorithm secret. Each tool you have available works and thinks differently, precisely because each one has its own classification and evaluation system. You only need to know the value as a rough indicator, to then make your assessments in the case of a link building campaign, a purchase of a domain close to expiration and everything concerning the listing of a website and its respective pages.