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I've been reading a little bit about authority sites, but cannot say that I have understood it completely.
How does one identify an authority site? Are the sites that rank well for a certain keyword, authroities, or is their a different criteria?
And finally how does one become an authority site?
Thanks
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?
The reason why I asked how to identify an authority site is because I am really confused by the following
Recently I decided to use the free webspace space provided by my isp - URI format - [ispsubdomain.ispdomain.com...]
the subdomain [ispsubdomain.ispdomain.com...] provided by the isp has thousands of pages on all kinds of topic by various members, but the main index page does not have many backlinks and is a PR4.
Now my page that I put up, is only a single page, with very little content, one incoming PR5 link, one outgoing link. This page within a month has started ranking in the top 30's for results that have 5M+ competing pages for two word phrases that are highly indicative of a certain topic.
In comparison my main site with many more on topic back links, a PR 5 index page, 200+ total pages is nowhere to be found for those two word phrases.
I thus assumed that the above [ispsubdomain.ispdomain.com...] was being considered as an authority by G, but it had no content and just 1 backlink. Is it possible that it is inheriting authoritativeness from the subdomain. But even the subdomain, by human evaluation does not appear to be an authority.
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.
Maybe, but there are other authorities as well.
There are authorities that seem to be authorative for each and every keyword.
once it has been heise.de (#1 tech-news site in germany)
once it has been spiegel.de (#1 other-news site in germany)
now it's wikipedia.
Especially the spiegel.de authority made me crying.
It was #1 for my top money keyword, just because it mentioned this absolute tech keyword in the headline of a completely off-topic article.
The article was about the marriage of a moderator. And just because some idiot thought this tech-keyword would look nice in the headline of this article they were #1 in the SERPs.
Of course they were linking to that headline :(
So my conclusion is:
There is a switch that makes a site (yes a site) authorative for each and everything, no theming etc.
Maybe the switch is PR>=8? I don't know.
Edit: PR>=8
What are different between Authority Site and Hub Site?
Quoting Mike Grehan from his excellent "Topic Distillation" article (which you should be able to find in PDF form by doing a web search):
Hubs and authorities exhibit a mutually reinforcing relationship: a good hub points to many good authorities; a good authority is pointed to by many good hubs (pages can be both good authorities and good hubs).
It certainly would not hurt you in the rankings to have your site have a high authority-like rating, but it is only a part of the score.
The reason to identify authority sites in your field is to be associated with them, not necessarily to become one of them.
Where is the backlink from? From the ISP?
From an absolutely unrelated site, with unrelated topic on page. Only relevant anchor text followed by the description. It shows up as a backlink in google, but the PR of my page is still 0.
The ISP has a link to all member pages 1000's on a single page..and mine being a new page is at the bottom. Also the PR of the page is 3. (I am not considering this to be a link as it easily exceeds the 100k html limit)
No other links.
<added>Forgot to mention that the backlink is from a links.cfm page</added>
I don't think you can use Mike Grehan's "Topic Distillation" in this conext. It states that there is a difference in the atributes of an Authority site in Teoma and Yahoo compared to Google. This particular article concerns the former and recognises that Google has a much different way of determining an authority site.
At least that is how I read it.
Think of an authority knob, that can be turned in either direction.
