One frustrating thing about webmasters is their tendency to mindlessly copy and clone everything in sight. This can range from entire websites to erroneous information. Once they get a wrong-headed idea into their minds, it’s like pulling teeth to try and get them to evolve and change. One of the most annoying misuses of a term lately has been the incorrect use of the term “Authority Site”, including “proof”.

The basics of the Authority Site argument

The basic gist of the Authority Site myth is the following: Google deems certain websites to be more special than others, and as part of that specialness, they include special indented listings to indicate the website’s authority. As an example, let’s look what happens when we type the name “Intel” into Google. We see this listing:

Sitelinks are determined algorithmically

You’ll notice the indented listings. These are referred to as SiteLinks by Google, with the following definition:

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

There is no mention of the word “Authority” at all. In fact, SiteLinks are determined by algo by query. So there’s no hint even that the presence of such links confer special status on websites that have them. That hasn’t stopped people from marketing about their Authority Sites, though, despite ample evidence that the ruse if false.

To see how ludicrous the idea of Authority is, check out this search for Alternative Baby Names. You’ll see the site in the first position has the SiteLinks. If you check their backlinks you’ll see they have a total of 4 links in total. Their authority comes for that term only, based on their domain name and a few links. You can find many more such examples of poor content, poorly linked websites that have SiteLinks because of their relevancy for a term.

It’s time this term was buried due to it’s misleading nature.