If you write in a blog in a regular periods or manage a website, you should learn what the term “authorship rank” means and how to use it for your own advantage.
The main reason is, if Google is able to “verify” reputable authors in certain fields, they will then be able to get rid of spammers and focusing on the original and legitimate content by influential content creators that have proven themselves in their industry or niche topic area.
You should be aware that Google’s main goal is to provide the most accurate and useful search results for a given query. Still, as there are billions of web pages, they can only trust their search persona on their algorithm. For years marketers have been trying to “crack Google’s algorithm code”, hoping it would elevate them to the top rankings. This constantly-evolving code has been reasonably easy to crack as it has largely involved signals from unverifiable sources.
Until now.
One of the favoured motives of Google+ has been to understand the people behind the content of the web. If you know how credible the author is and their level of expertise, then you have a fairly good idea of how useful the content they produce on a given subject is going to be and rank it accordingly. This is their Author rank.
So while there is no official word or research on the positive impact of author rank on search engine rankings many of us believe (I say ‘us’ because I fully believe this) that this will have an impact in the future.
So what now?
If you have a blog or website that relies on traffic from Google, it would be a right way to establish your reputation and credibility for your given niche by adding Google+ to your marketing strategy.
The following points are essential. They act as the indicators of your credibility to Google. If you want to take advantage of author rank influence on your site’s rankings, consider building these on Google+:
- The average number of +1s and shares on on-topic G+ posts
- The number of relevant Google+ circles you are in.
- Reciprocal connections to other relevant high Author Rank authors.
- The number and authority of sites an author’s content has been published to (tracked with Authorship tags – more on this in the next tip).
- The engagement level of an author’s native Google+ content (i.e., posts to Google+).
- The level of on-site engagement for an author’s content around the web
- YouTube subscribers and/or engagement on authored videos (Google+ comments are now integrated with YouTube)
These items may not even be relevant to some of you, but it certainly is an important part of what Google is striving for.