The Search for Extra Authority Sites - Sponsored

A site dedicated to the search for extra authority sites.

About Autho-Rity.com
What are Authority Sites?
Well, Authority Sites are sites which are recognized by Search Engines as "authorities" in certain subjects or topics for some search terms. Think of them as "popular" sites for those terms. These sites are usually big and usually have very high quality and accurate content. One of the important thing about authority sites is that people will often search for them. This simply means that Search Engines believe that they are popular enough and because of this, others will possibly link to them. For Search Engines like Google, and to break away from the mold of just backlinks as votes, they will take it as an indictation of higher quality. Although this may not always be true. As I am sure you know, Google's algothrim is based on links, the more links and the higher quality links a site has linking to them, the higher the rankings it will have. This method is slightly different from the traditional backlink voting system. Although it still makes use of backlinks to gauge popularity for rankings, they see how often someone clicks on a particular site for these terms and assigns "authority site" status for those terms. And I am sure that Google themselves do a careful manual review on that site first before giving it an "authority site" status.

Perhaps the simplest way to define Authority Sites is "sites which people search often for". Of course this is not 100% accurate.

I have seen SEO companies claiming that in order to get this status, you need to spend money on getting a well-optimized website designed for Search Engines. And that PageRank is the main factor. These SEO companies claimed that MOST if not ALL authority sites have very high PageRank (PageRank value of 7 and above), which is not true. Sure, most authority sites have a decent PageRank because of the number of backlinks they have, but not all authority sites have a high PageRank. Although PageRank does matter in an indirect way, it shouldn't be the main reason why a site is given an "authority site" status. And I have seen sites which don't even care much for Search Engine Optimization gaining "authority site" status. Quality content and useful information should be the key components of any authority site. Never fall for these wild cliams.

To check whether a site has been given "authority site" status, you need to do a search on Google for it's full domain name. For example: here. The extra fours links Google gives to a site tells us that this is an authority site.