I believe an authority site is the site with a lot of quality content and a lot of quality inbound links.
An authority site is a site that is known by everyone in a niche as being a high quality site. For instance, forums.digitalpoint.com is an authority site in the webmaster niche. Tomshardware.com is an authority site in the computer niche. NOAA.gov and Accuweather.com are authority sites in the weather niche.
I think i understand his question... Is there some method to see if Google considers a site an 'authority', or does the PR tell us the level of authority?
thank you Tearabite. thats my question: Is there some method to see if Google considers a site an 'authority'? here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=240538 someone writes about "authority site links". are those "authority site links" properties of an authority site? sorry for my bad english
That is a very good question. Google does rank some sites as being some form of "authority", such as DMOZ and Wikipedia. However, I don't think they do it on a widespread basis. If someone is saying their site is "authority", it is just marketing talk. It won't make a major difference. If a site is truly "authority", they won't have to tell you. One example of what I consider to be an authority is Proxy.org. Proxies are my niche and whenever someone mentions they have a new proxy, the first thing they are told is to get listed on Proxy.org. It is an authority, but they do not call themselves one. Though Google ranks the site highly in its search engine results, it is not a labeled authority and sites listed on it get no special treatment from Google. However, many high quality sites that would be considered "authority" by many have a high Google page rank (at least 5 or 6 in my opinion) and high traffic (at least 1,000 uniques per day for a low traffic niche). Getting links on these sites will give you good a better ranking on Google. So in essence being on a site considered to be an authority by many is good, but just because someone tells you their site is an authority doesn't mean anything. I hope this post helps. Thanks for the rep CB. I'm glad my post helped people.