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How do you know if it's an authority site?

by kIwOk168
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
For SEO Competition purposes, how do you determine if the sites that are appear in your keyword SERP are authority sites?

I'm having a hard time determining a site if it's an authority site or just a wannabe site. Some sites are just butt ugly but turn out to be hard to outrank=)

What criteria do you use to see if a competing website is an authority site or not?
#authority #site
  • Profile picture of the author neno
    Check out the backlinks of website and PR. If it is getting too many backlinks from a wide variety of sources than it is an authority website. To check backlinks you can use Yahoo site explorer ot Backlink watch.
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  • Profile picture of the author Bruce Hearder
    A rough guide to use is :

    Sites with High PR + lots of links (including links from wikipedia, cnn,abc, bbc etc, gov sites) and has age is a good sign they may be authority sites.
    It still doesn't mean that they are impossible to shift from the front page, its may mean you have to put in a bit extra to make it happen.

    Hope this helps

    Bruce
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  • Profile picture of the author desouth
    Originally Posted by kIwOk168 View Post

    For SEO Competition purposes, how do you determine if the sites that are appear in your keyword SERP are authority sites?

    I'm having a hard time determining a site if it's an authority site or just a wannabe site. Some sites are just butt ugly but turn out to be hard to outrank=)

    What criteria do you use to see if a competing website is an authority site or not?
    Base of how much and good the content
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  • Profile picture of the author jacky212
    The age of the website and the backlinks will determine the relevancy of the website and obviously with high PR.
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  • Profile picture of the author Bob Monie
    Webpages that dont appear to have a relevant title but is ranking due to the keyphrase being used once in the body content.

    You know if a webpage is ranking that easy for a decent keyphrase it must be an authority site.

    Easiest way would be to use Traffic Travis SEO Software found at Free SEO Software | The Best PPC & SEO Management Tool -Traffic Travis, its free and tells you everything you need to know about the top 20 results on any keyphrase. Id be so lost without TT, highly recommended for finding your answer.
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  • Profile picture of the author acecranes
    I have known about the wikipedia, Dmoz and ehow are the three authority sites. Links from the authority sites have been given maximum value by the search Engines.
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  • Profile picture of the author ~kev~
    This is what I look at - I like to think of it as a wikipedia test. If you do some generic searches, wikipedia will usually rank at the top of the list.

    Useful content - how much content does the site actually provide?

    Age - how old is the site? I like to think that authority sites have to be at least 4 - 5 years old. There are a lot of sites out there that are 10 - 15 years old. A lot of times, the older articles and older sites will rank at the top of the searches.

    Backlinks - kinda explains itsself
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  • Profile picture of the author johnben1444

    The factors that I would consider (if I were the one writing the code to determine this) the most important would be the amount of content, and the incoming linking pattern. There are authorities that link out and there are some that do not. But if they link out, who they link to would also be important.     You need to have a lot of content to be an authority. an authority on car tires doesn't just tell you that they are those round rubber things full of air. They know all the different tread patterns, rubber combinations, wear rates, and a whole lot of other things that I don't know about because I am not an authority on tires.
    A lot of that content would be in pages larger than is generally recommended when it comes to SEO. Let's face it, a discussion of the various uses for different tire rubber compounds by experts could run a lot longer than any of us have the patience to read.
    As for incoming links, there should be a lot of them from most of the websites in your field. If you are the authority, then your pears will recognize you as the authority.
    The links should be fairly natural, with a reasonably wide variety of anchor text. The links should go to all sorts of different pages in the site, as people weill be wanting to quote your authoritative opinion.
    The site should be in lots of directories.
    Links from content pages on other sites would be a big bonus.
    Assessing the outbound links would be a lot more complicated, and I would have to think about that a lot more before implimenting an algorithm that would take that into account.
    Of course, since I don't work for Google, the above is only an educated guess.
    As a human, you have a real advantage over an algo, you *know* who you consider to be an authority. If a site seems to be authoritative, it probably is. Is it a source that the NY Times would quote in one of their articles as an expert?
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    • Profile picture of the author connorbringas
      Check PR, check backlinks, check traffic.
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