Google’s Author Rank essentially enables online authors to become more visible, and at the same time, use their identity as a factor for ranking pages and sites. This is done using rich snippets. Authors are then ranked based content they produce factors include: social endorsements (tweets, +1’s, shares, likes), comments on social and the quality and relevancy of inbound links pointing to the content. Content quality, as measured by search engines, is no longer based only on the authority of a domain or Web page. It is increasingly based on the reputation and ability of the individual that authored the content.
The Panda update pushed out by Google acts as a site quality filter, but Author Rank works as a domain level filter that uses an aggregate of documents to rank an author. The more an author writes on a topic, and the more engagement with that content, the higher that author’s rank will be for a specific topic.
How Exactly Author Rank Works:
Technical three steps are:
- Write quality content
- Install Google+’s “+1” to certify and share the content
- Include rel= “me” and rel= “author” whenever you link your content and author page to the Google+ profile
Let me explain it theoretically when you publish content online you have the option to indicate to Google who the author is, a tag called an author markup to be inserted in the code of a particular piece of content. By implementing rel=“author” on your site you’re telling Google you’re the author of that piece.
Through this author mark up, when a social media user on Google+ shares that author’s content, the author will gain author authority and links. When people find your content engaging, connect and interact with you on social networks, link to your content, share it on social media sites, theoretically your Author Rank will increase.
Page Rank will still play a major role in SEO, but the importance of Author Rank will only continue to increase in the future. Quality content will be written by trusted authors but some of the factors affecting Author Rank would be: Speedily shared content, who shared, number of comments given to your content, comments are positive or not. Another strong contributing factor is comments quality most of us have seen more than our fair share of blog posts filled with irrelevant comments and spammed links. Author Rank will help push for higher quality comments and turn comments into an asset for authors. And most of these factors make sense and are quite logical.
Other Factor Related to Author Ranking:
- Find authors who already have AuthorRank and building the AuthorRank of those within the organization.
- Join authority of social media profiles from Google plus, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other trusted social platforms.
- Aggregated page rank of authors content on own blog and 3rd party sites.
- The signatures of reputable agents can be used to promote the ranking of signed content in web search results, agents have a powerful incentive to establish and maintain a good reputational score.
- Verify the strength of influential writers in your industry, follow them and author status using social media tools/metrics.
- Hire authors with a strong natural social following and high content sharing ratio.
- Go to networking events, meetings for bloggers, seminars, exhibitions, chat to them and follow up afterwards.
- Keep in mind to mark up your posts/content with a link back to your Google + profile.
As search marketing and SEO become more content-focused disciplines, marketers in 2013 will need to pay attention to AuthorRank.
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