3 Reasons Authorship Is The New PageRank
When Google announced authorship markup back in June, I said at the time I could see it eventually being more important than PageRank. Today I was yacking to staff about the variables we are now seeing in the SERPS from Google social signals, +1, Facebook shares & likes, retweets etc. Over the weekend on Google+, I caught this post from Pete Cashmore. Google announced that shares of links in Google+ would also start showing in search results. If someone in your various social networks has shared, +1, liked or tweeted a link that is slightly relevant to your search then, it will most likely show up on page one of the results. You will only see those sorts of results though, if you are logged into Google and have setup your Google profile with links to your various social outlets. How can a business leverage this? Simple, create great content that people want to share and make it easy for them to share it. Make it easy by adding the various social sharing buttons on your site like we have on this blog post (all tweets, +1 & likes appreciated) . If you want to focus on something really important though, consider your Google Profile & authorship markup. Below is my first infographic 🙂 made with 20th century whiteboard technology! This was scrawled for an impromptu training session with staff today.
Whilst sharing, liking, tweeting +1ing are all important to help get your content out to a wider audience the results are essentially out of your control and they only affect personalised results. They are more important for your long term Authorship quality score. Authorship will appear to everyone, regardless if they have a Google account or not.
1. Authorship markup clarifies attribution
With so many scraping tools, syndicators & content thieves attribution is an issue Google have been trying to solve for a while. Google will always try to rank the original piece of content rather than the copies but the main way it has achieved this in the past is by age of content. Usually the piece of content it found first it would rank higher (there are other variables but this was the main one in our experience). If someone else ranks above you for your content, they got the Google bot out to their post first. They may have built a whole bunch of backlinks very fast or maybe they just happened to ping Google before you did, either way it sucks more than 200 pound mosquito coming off a vegan diet. Using Authorship markup though the is problem solved. All those backlinks or PageRank that the copy site had counts for nought. Google knows through Authorship markup that you are the originator of the content.
2. Authorship creates a quality score
Google will certainly develop (if they haven’t already) signals around an author’s content to score it’s quality. If your content gets shared a lot, it will not only affect the ranking of the content that gets shared but also its author. Like PageRank is a measure of the cumulative PageRank of pages that link to yours, so your Authorship will be affected by the quality of the other Authors that share your content as well as the content you write yourself. Still with me? Other factors will include things like where the author publishes and publishing frequency. Frequency is important because it will help establish the quantitive score on content types. The more you publish, the more opportunities for your content to be shared. If one author has more shares than you on a particular subject it will inform their authority on that subject. PageRank or more accurately, Publisher authority will also have an impact on an Authors’ quality score. If you are an author who gets published on a highly reputable & authoritative site, it will give your Authorship more authority, the way a backlink from the same site to one of your pages currently does.
3. Authorship will be the new tie breaker
Apart from increasing clickthrough rates, Authorship will be the tie breaker that PageRank used to be. If two pages were equally ranked for a certain phrase, keyword density, key phrase placement etc. the one with higher Pagerank would always rank higher. I believe Authorship will play a similar role. Â Now if two pages are equally ranked for their content but one has a more “reputable” author, it will rank higher. Backlinks will still have a role to play but the era of paying third world contractors to generate thousands of junk backlinks is close to its end. Google is always trying to improve the quality of its results and eliminate the noise. Authorship results are still being tested and rolled out but as this video released last week from Matt Cutts & Othar Hansson of Google below shows, there is a major push behind this effort.
What do you think? Is Authorship about more than just attribution?
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
