Get me some website authority

The Importance of Backlink Authority and Server IP Ranges

This blog is effectively about the effectiveness of linking domains and how you should use different sets of servers to interlink to your particular site that you’re trying to link to and not necessarily from the same server. This is typically a problem for agencies that naturally work in this space with footer backlinks on their sites.

We all make mistakes, and recently I had dropped my ranking from being first on Google against my competitors in the Wagga Web Design keyword to being in the fifth position. This occurred around October and November last year, and I was left scratching my head on what I’d done wrong. I thought maybe it was that I had a new root keyword Cairns Web Design it had figured out it needed to spread my authority between pages or something weird.

Negative backlinks

The idea that somebody put some negative backlinks against my site had popped into my head, but in doing some research, I don’t think that’s the case.

Google algorithm update

I thought maybe it was just due to a Google algorithm update and the fact that they’d changed things so that they pretty much ignored any of their authority in terms of the E-E-A-T type metrics. I actually don’t believe in this metric at all. I think that it’s just rumours and speculation put out there by Google trying to get website owners to create good content.

SEO knowledge

I would say that I’m an SEO person, someone that has a lot of knowledge in that area, both on-site and off-site. So where did I go wrong. I even went as far as to map the SERP or the ranking over time. You can read more about my slow journey to recovery in this post and which also talks about SEO is a competition not a checklist. I must say I simply love that phrase.

Backlink authority

Really, your website is a product of external link authority. It’s not necessarily to do with the speed, although it has a part, or the content, although it also has a part, but I think that really what it comes down to is backlink authority and sites linking to yours.

Lesson learned

If you’re ranking number one, don’t change anything.

Duplicate content

I also thought it may have even been duplicate content. I created a new page around that October-November for my Cairns presence, and some of that content may have been considered duplicate content and could have actually given me a penalty. I changed all the content on that page so that it wasn’t necessarily too similar to some of my other location pages, and I think that that did help. That got me up a couple of positions.

Backlink value

The value of those backlinks often is determined not necessarily on the domain authority or the page authority or whatever metric you might be using from whatever tool you’re using. They’re all different, Moz, SEMrush, and also hrefs, they all use an estimate to do with the authority of your website. DA, PR is a couple of terms you’ll hear thrown around.

Purchasing domains

I even looked at creating a portfolio of domains and purchasing some domains. By the way, that is super expensive to get anything of any quality and also contextually. You’ll pay well over $200 for a domain with 20 DA that is actually worth anything. Maybe even more. Times that by say 5 or 6 for each industry and you’ll soon figure out it’s costly.

Keeping your IP’s separate

One thing that I’ve learned that I think has been the factor that has hurt me the most is IP ranges. Essentially, I’ve moved my main website onto a server that was the highest spec server available at the time. Unfortunately, I had probably another 15 websites that were also on that same server that were backlinking to my website. Now straight away, that looks like what they call a PBN. It’s basically a backlinking network of sites that the whole goal is to give authority. But if they’re coming from the one source, then you pretty much know there’s something wrong with that authority that’s being handed over to my website.

My Seperate Instance Solution:

I’ve moved my website to an independent server that’s completely separate, not only in terms of the other sites that are hosted on that server, but also in terms of the locale or the location where that server is hosted. I’ve also made sure my proxy is turned on at Cloudflare which gives you an IP that’s nothing like your server from the outside looking in. Previously this was set to be unproxied.

Server Cost concerns

What I am actually struggling with at the moment is the additional cost that it’s probably going to cost me to host that and to boost it up to be the same level of performance. But we’re going to have a look at that anyway in the next few weeks. Expecting to pay $80+ per month for some grunt machine. I hate wasting money if I don’t need to and I think the consideration of a proxy and cloudflare may make this argument redundant.

Lighthouse Performance

Lighthouse is scoring a 97 for performance at the moment, which I’m actually pretty happy with. But it was scoring a 100 on my other server that I had. Despite the fact that it’s pretty much a copy and a clone, it could also be interesting the time to first byte number as well. I think that time to first byte number could be somewhat different as well. This can also vary depending on where you are in the world and that sort of thing. I have articles on testing with lighthouse here.

Nofollow backlinks

I have also gone through the process of not entirely removing backlinks from footers, but certainly changing them from a follow to a nofollow.

So nofollow essentially means that you’re not transferring any authority from one site to another, which can be problematic in terms of reducing your domain authority. But it’s all a bit of a complex setup, really. And anyone that thinks that they know the secrets behind the curtain of Google are pretty much lying to you. But we try stuff, and we adjust, and we try more stuff, and then we adjust again.

Future updates

I will report back on this. I mean, it could go completely the other way. I could end up on page two based on the changes that I’ve made. But look, let’s see what happens. At the moment, I’m encouraged that it’s going to work out okay. And we just want to see, maybe a position two would be nice. And I think that this should give us the leverage that we need.

Thank you for reading this, and I look forward to the next one.