One of the undoubtedly important — but not always clearly understood — factors in working with link mass during site promotion is the domain authority factor.
Why do some sites get more authority, even though they behave less naturally than others? Why is it hard for new sites to gain trust?
Good links have RAT (Relevance, Authority, Transfer). If relevance and transfer of link weight are reasonably clear, the concept of authority still raises questions.
To achieve authority, you need time. Newly created sites should start building authority as early as possible and follow good behaviour rules for a fairly long time, since incoming links produce the result needed for promotion far from immediately.
Don’t engage with spam tactics — using such methods in SEO will not only fail to build authority, but you can lose a significant portion of it and have to spend time recovering.
The concept of authority applies to the entire domain. Reaching Google’s top in a short time with a new domain is almost impossible. Subdomains have the same authority as parent sites, but a subdomain losing authority doesn’t strongly affect the parent domain’s authority. Unlike a subdomain, the authority of a subdirectory affects the entire domain.
You can reduce authority-building time by getting incoming links from sufficiently authoritative sites. So if a domain rarely places direct external links, a single such link transfers quite a lot of authority.
However, links from authoritative sites are often hard to get. You can check which sites authoritative domains link to, why, and try to copy those sites’ strategy.
Authority is also very important when behaviour is unnatural. If many links from low-authority sites suddenly appear pointing to a new site, it looks suspicious and can lead to a Google penalty. If a known resource links to it, however, there will be no Google sanctions.
When a large company changes its name or merges with another and changes its domain, re-promoting the site can take a lot of time. That’s why Google transfers authority via a general 301 redirect.
Which domains does Google consider most authoritative? You can check by typing a generic query into the search bar. For example, the query “www” will return old sites with strong inbound links — most of which are fairly well known. In localised Google versions, you’ll see local authoritative sites: large companies, telecoms, government organisations, universities, search engines, social networks.
