Site Authority

[MPC]

It's obvious that mypokercorner will become an authority site down the road.

After reading this from Sebs, I was just curious as to what makes a site an "authority". How do you define an authority site? Discuss.

[Sebastian]

That was kind of a broad statement from me. I would redefine that as very trusted and valued by Google which would see it as an important site in the field of poker. Sites that have been around for years and have thousands of backlinks and are "trusted" often rank well for a lot of good keyword terms.

[KevinG]

I was just curious as to what makes a site an "authority".

Lots of relevant content + lots of anchored links. When I think about building an "authority" site, I want to be the "go-to" site in that niche.

very trusted and valued by Google which would see it as an important site in the field of poker. Sites that have been around for years and have thousands of backlinks and are "trusted" often rank well for a lot of good keyword terms.

This too.

[Bryan]

When Google considers a site an authority on a given topic, that site is rewarded with a listing like this:

[The Poker Jerk]

When Google considers a site an authority on a given topic, that site is rewarded with a listing like this:

I have a couple sites with listings like that. I wish they let us have full control of what gets put there! On one of my sites, it's just a bunch of links to my monthly archive pages!

[Bryan]

Setup a google webmaster central account, and you can block certain pages from being displayed in that list. You can't pick the pages you want listed there though.

[The Poker Jerk]

Setup a google webmaster central account, and you can block certain pages from being displayed in that list. You can't pick the pages you want listed there though.

In my case, they are all archive links, except for one. But you need to leave at least 3 in order to keep them there.

[Bryan]

If you want to share the URL and search term, I or someone else here can probably help diagnose why that would be happening. In most cases, I set automatically generated archive pages to not be indexed (they generally don't provide anything unique, just a listing of pages). They can be convenient for users, but SE's shouldn't them to be able to find all the pages on your site (that's what a sitemap is for).

The good news: Google considers your site an authority on a given keyword phrase.

The bad news: Google considers your archive pages to be the primary sections of your site that a user might be interested in for that given keyword.

[The Poker Jerk]

My site is very well indexed by Google (it's 9 years old). It's not too big of a problem. I don't know why it does that, I tried blocking it with robots.txt but that didn't help. I would love to use a sitemap, but right now I am running on two different CMS platforms, one of which is custom and would need a sitemap designed for it.