I've seen many people post they are selling an authority site or links with authority. I've seen people point to the site having an extended results listing in Google as evidence of authority... but I have a PR1 celeb site with an extended listing, and I doubt that should be classified as authoritive. (although it does get more traffic and adsense revenue than I think it deserves) I've seen someone else post that google indexing their new pages within minutes was proof of authority... but again I have sites that this happens with that I would have guessed did not have authority status. How do you decide how much authority a site might have?
One way is if it has a high PR, where it either has lots of websites linking to it, or has other authority websites linking to it.
It's meaningless. For some mythical reason some people think having sitelinks is a some kind of little gift google has given them because they're so damned nice. It's rubbish. Google has never described a site as an authority site. And as you've discovered, google is trying to give sitelinks to most sites - as a help to searchers, not a selling point to webmasters.
I agree G is all about providing user search results rather than business opportunities for webmasters, but I would not describe the concept of authority as meaningless. Google (via Matt Cutts et al) do use the word authority themselves quite a lot btw.
wow. I thought that a authority site was a high pagerank site within the same niche as mine.. I thought that would have good value with google... am I off?
By that definition, would you say all the sites that Google show as backlinks have some "authority value" for your site? I had always imagined that if a site is trusted/authoritive by G's definition, whatever it links to will reap some benefit from it. (either by being spidered more regulalry or gaining some link juice) Still hoping to hear more ideas on how I would decide if a site had authority when assessing it as a potential link partner or ad spot purchase.
just do searches for where the site appears for keywords, look at the traffic if you can, look at the content, age of the site, there some good indicators i think
If it has site links at SE then people says its authority. Usually its a site with good PR and traffic.q
A high authority site is a site that has been in there index and competed well for a number of years(more then a couple) in a certain niche. Has many other backlinks that are similar (not just blog comments ect.) Usually your main competition.