Even Google seems more like a paid directory with sponsored ads and shopping feeds all above the fold on page one; it is still the most used search engine globally.
If there were no organic results, there would be no search engine, and the advertisers would be spending their money on other platforms.
Google must serve highly relevant search results to the users. Else they would simply abandon the ship and use another search engine like Bing – that is why authority matters!.
The battle between Google and SEO
It is a bit weird that Google relies on webmasters and quality content, but on the other hand, try their best to prevent SEOs from figuring out how their algorithms work.
The main reason is that Google knows the value of free organic traffic – and so does the SEO community.
If you can rank in the top three in Google for a highly competitive keyword with decent search volume, you would see a swarm of free traffic to your site.
You just need to present a product for the users (where you are earning affiliate commission).
That’s it; now you have created a money machine – rinse and repeat.
You can probably imagine if you were able to rank some kind of bogus product as number 1 on page one in Google if people were searching for “How to cure cancer.”
It would have a very negative impact on Google, and the news would spread that you can’t rely on the search results showing up in Google.
Google needs to ensure somehow that search queries that might affect peoples life is somehow accurate.
They need to focus on the accuracy of SEPRS, especially related to medical, drugs, loans, finance, and other issues that can affect the user’s life and well-being.
These types of niches are known as YMYL: Your Money or Your Life Content.
So if you target that kind of niches, it is not enough with a well-optimized SEO article and a nice big bucket of backlinks – you need real authority.
Since Google is perfectly aware of those niches where they have to be careful what kind of stuff they would rank, I think it is safe to assume that ranking for keywords in those niches requires high authority,
It is pretty easy for Google to measure the overall authority/PageRank of a website for a start.
Google is also pretty good to determine a website’s niche, so it would be highly unusual to see an article about cancer ranking on a gambling website.
If you publish the same article on a highly established medical website, the author was already an established cancer specialist. There would be a pretty good chance that the article would rank well.
If other medical websites and news websites would then link to this article, there is a pretty good chance that you would see it rank on the very top of Google.
The short answer is yes, and SEO´s are trying their best all the time – and sometimes they succeed.
Some years ago, EDU or GOV links could make a positive impact on your rankings.
It didn’t take the SEO community a long time to establish connections or pay students to put links on their EDU blogs to a website.
Another (also used today) strategy is to register an expired domain with a lot of authority backlinks and rebuild the previous content,
Then new content would be published that could link to a money site and help improve its rankings in the SERPS.
Sometimes, those rebuild expired domains can be so strong that they can even rank in Google’s top three brand names.
Just because it might work (at least for a while), it is not a strategy you should pursue to establish a business or a brand.
This strategy is considered pure blackhat, and you never know when Google will deindex your site.
To build authority, you need to be an expert within your niche.
I don’t say that you need to be a “plumbing professor” if you are a plumber, but Google and the users need to know that you are indeed a qualified plumber.
You need to focus on E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
If you are a business, you need to LOOK LIKE A BUSINESS.
You need to show that you have an address, phone number, a contact page, terms and services, and an about us page.
If you can obtain backlinks from local websites or niche relevant websites like plumbing associations, chamber of commerce, business directories, and similar types of links, it would increase your authority.
If your brand/business also has social profiles, Google can see that all those entities are connected.
Of course, your content needs to be well optimized for your primary keywords, and then the final step is to hunt for those authority backlinks that can bump your website on page one.
If you think link building is time-consuming and expensive, don’t worry, you can do it completely free.
There is even a piece of software that can help you organize your entire link building strategy.