What are Authority Sites?

Well, Authority Sites are sites which are recognized by Search Engines as "authorities" in certain subjects or topics for some search terms. Think of them as "popular" sites for those terms. These sites are usually big and usually have very high quality and accurate content. One of the important thing about authority sites is that people will often search for them. This simply means that Search Engines believe that they are popular enough and because of this, others will possibly link to them. For Search Engines like Google, and to break away from the mold of just backlinks as votes, they will take it as an indictation of higher quality. Although this may not always be true. As I am sure you know, Google's algothrim is based on links, the more links and the higher quality links a site has linking to them, the higher the rankings it will have. This method is slightly different from the traditional backlink voting system. Although it still makes use of backlinks to gauge popularity for rankings, they see how often someone clicks on a particular site for these terms and assigns "authority site" status for those terms. And I am sure that Google themselves do a careful manual review on that site first before giving it an "authority site" status.

Perhaps the simplest way to define Authority Sites is "sites which people search often for". Of course this is not 100% accurate.

I have seen SEO companies claiming that in order to get this status, you need to spend money on getting a well-optimized website designed for Search Engines. And that PageRank is the main factor. These SEO companies claimed that MOST if not ALL authority sites have very high PageRank (PageRank value of 7 and above), which is not true. Sure, most authority sites have a decent PageRank because of the number of backlinks they have, but not all authority sites have a high PageRank. Although PageRank does matter in an indirect way, it shouldn't be the main reason why a site is given an "authority site" status. And I have seen sites which don't even care much for Search Engine Optimization gaining "authority site" status. Quality content and useful information should be the key components of any authority site. Never fall for these wild cliams.

To check whether a site has been given "authority site" status, you need to do a search on Google for it's full domain name. For example: here. The extra fours links Google gives to a site tells us that this is an authority site.

And if you search through some of these authority sites, you will realize that some of them are not Search Engine Friendly. In fact, a lot of them have very poor onpage optimization done. These sites depend on their content/information to get natural links. What I am trying to say is that, Google doesn't look for h1 or h2 tags when considering a site for "authority site" status.

Why list authority sites?

The main objective of this directory is to collect a list of authority sites, categorized into different topics for easy reference.

We all know that in order to achieve high rankings, you need backlinks. However, links have different weightage or value to them, depending on how Google sees them. An authority site will usually have more weightage for their outbound links because they are "more popular", so this means that if an authority site links to you, that link is probably more valued in the eyes of google. And hence you will get better rankings. In my opinion, it is better to have a small number of high quality links then a large number of low quality links.

So the purpose of this site is to help webmasters and those who are interested to find and discover authority sites in the various subjects and see whether how you can get links from them. However, I would not recommend readers to buy links from these sites. It is better to get links from them because of good and useful content on your site. Or you could inform the webmaster of an article you have writen and asked them to link to you for the benefit of their visitors.

With that all said, I have read on some forums that some authority sites which have sold links have their links devalued. Although I am not sure how true is this, this could mean that natural links is still the best way to go.

Help Us Help You

If you have know of any authority site which is not already listed, please help us by submitting the site into our directory. You can submit sites here. I will try to approve it within 2 to 3 days.

If you have or know a site with a PageRank of 4 and above, please visit our sister directory High Page Rank Sites to submit the URL. We are compiling a list of high PageRank sites on the Internet.

Contact Us

You can email me at admin (AT) efwsg (DOT) org for comments on the site or any other enquiries. I may not answer all of them but I will certainly read them. And oh, thank you for visiting this directory.