AuthorRank / Authorship
You know how I bang on incessantly about how important it is to have your Authorship setup? Well for some reason over the last week there has been a bunch of stories about “AuthorRank” and what a game changer it will be. Back 2011 I was saying how I thought authorship signals would eventually be more important than Pagerank as Pagerank is so easily gamed.
Let’s not make the same mistakes as PageRank.
A lot of SEO companies tended to make the practice of SEO all about PageRank or backlinks ignoring the 200 or so other things they should be doing. I see this a lot with site owners too. Whether you rank or not for a given phrase is all about how relevant your page is for that phrase. PageRank is the tie breaker and I believe “AuthorRank” will perform a similar function. At an individual level though, authorship carries something that you can take with you, to different publications and sites. It will increase click through rates in the SERPs and helps with your personal branding. Saying the greater your “authorrank” or pagerank will shoot you up in the SERPS though is insane (apologies to the crazy people). A Leyland P76 can beat a Ferrari too… as long as the Ferarri doesn’t enter the race.
To look at it another way, abc.net.au has a PageRank of 8/10 but we out rank them for “SEO Companies Melbourne” with a much lower PageRank, why? Because they don’t have that phrase on their site! There is so much more to ranking for a phrase than any one thing.
Be careful with Authorship
Google has said previously that if you personally break their terms of service they can take away your Google profile. That’s nasty, that means your Gmail, Youtube channel, the lot. This is another reason why it becomes a valuable tool for Google. Spammers beware!
If you are a blogger or a journalist, I’d love to know if you have set it up yet and have published on multiple sites.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
