'Net Features : authorship markup

Author Rank Concerns and Other POVs

Amberly Dressler — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:39:00 GMT

Author Rank is all the buzz in SEO communities, because it helps companies achieve better online visibility.

With that in mind, Covario, a search-marketing agency, released a point of view (POV) on Google Author Rank and how best to leverage it for SEO. The POV details: what author rank is and why it matters, how to prepare for author rank, author rank concerns and actionable insights.

Let’s look at author rank concerns, as provided by Covario:

Selling an Authorship Account – Google’s Matt Cutts’s response to this is that there is FTC legislation against what he dubbed a “sock puppet” account and that Google has checks and balances to make sure ghost postings aren’t allowed under an authority account.

Author Leaves the Company – Company posts should also include a rel publisher tag to the company’s Google+ account as protection against this event. The article will still carry weight of the author’s authority and could only benefit as the author expands his or her influence in new endeavors.

Author Rank for Bing – Bing relies more on its data relationships with Facebook and Twitter, while also pulling in the enhanced data provided by microformat implementation according to Schema.org.

Comments and Author Rank – Google is looking to align authorship and comments in its weighting of those factors toward Author Rank, so be careful on politically sensitive comments associated by an author of a company.

The rest of the POV on Google Author Rank can be downloaded free from Covario’s website.

The Web Pro's Guide to Authorship Markup

Michael Garrity — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 19:55:00 GMT

Web professionals immediately embraced Google authorship markup, despite kind of being a tricky way to convince people to join Google+, when it was unveiled in 2011.

In case you’re still (somehow) unfamiliar with authorship markup, just know that it is a Google-specific microdata set that utilizes the rel=author tag to enhance tagged Web pages when they appear in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). To the casual user, these markups can be identified by the little author portraits that appear next to certain Web pages on Google Search and link to the author’s Google+ page. You can learn more about how to implement a rel=author tag in “The Difference Between rel=author & rel=publisher.”

It makes sense that Internet professionals would want to take advantage of these tags as much as possible, because markup doesn’t really require any additional work once it’s been implemented, but it can provide an incredible boost when it comes to driving search traffic.

--> Read the Web Pro's Guide to Authorship Markup Now

Author Stats Now in Webmaster Tools

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:00:00 GMT

This week Google released Author Stats within its Webmaster Tools product. Authorship annotations (read more here) are fast becoming a must-have element on websites as they provide greater visibility on the SERPs.

The new report will essentially just show how often this annotated content is showing on the search results pages. If an author has associated their content with a Google profile, they will be able to see the amount of impressions and clicks it received. While there’s certainly no guarantee that setting up authorship annotations will matter to SERP position, but it is easy to understand how they might positively influence a users decision to click through.

Google has made several improvements to its authorship annotations since its release earlier this year. For example, an indication of how many Google+ users have the author in their Circles appears on the SERPs, as does the ability to add an author directly to circle. Search engine users can also access comments posted on Google+ about an article shared by the author.

Google's Author Tag – Conduits to Richer Writer Profiles

Administrator — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:15:00 GMT

This week Google announced support for “authorship markup” which will help the search engine connect its users with authors through the content those authors publish on the web. Google will ultimately use the data to help its users find content from specific authors directly within the search results but it could also help Google rank search results.

According to Google, the author tag markup enables websites to “publicly link within their site from content to author pages.” This means that if you were to use the markup, you would be able to connect all of the articles to an individual author page (which is what Google will likely include on search results pages). The author pages, according to the announcement, will describe and identify the author, and can include content like the author’s bio and photo, articles and other links.

Authorship markup uses the “rel” attribute in links to indicate the relationship between a content page and an author page. For example:

If you are already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, Google will interpret that authorship information as well.

An important “usage” cue was provided by Google in that the rel=author link must point to an author page on the same site as the content page. The benefit of using authorship markup and remaining consistent in usage is that search engines and other web services will be able to identify works by the same author more easily.

Google has worked with several sites to markup their pages, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNET, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and others. Google has also added the markup to everything hosted by YouTube and Blogger. In the future, both platforms will automatically include this markup when content is published.