How Google authorship Markup Changes SEO
Google has taken away the confidence of keeping a steady flow where SEO comes into action, but then it provides steps to follow and climb up the ladder. In 2011 Matt Cutts announced a new feature for Google’s search engine that could help in increasing website owner’s authority. The new feature “Author rank” came along with launch of Google +1 and was enabled to help website owner’s achieve a higher ranking and authority with this.
Your SEO world is full of new changes, which recycle this chain and can even drag you out of this chain. You must have heard of the bio rule “survival of the fittest”, just like that; you want to survive these changes then you have to make changes! If you haven’t added this feature by far, then you no doubt are missing a huge deal. When Google makes something and infect brings up something, it does mean something as well. Consider your business as a game and take these features as hints, play along if you want to win.
Since SEO world is changing and so Is Google’s search engine. Google’s aim behind introducing this new algorithm feature was; if you post high quality content, then you should get high ranking. Do remember that, this feature might indicate social link building through Google.
How This Works:
Using Author markup creates an authority for the content, and in other words for you. When your content gets shared in social media sites, you tend to gain authority and +1. If your content gets shared more, you gain more authority trust. It’s a rich snippet attached with a picture and links to Google+ account. This feature would enable more searches for the linked author.
How It Affects SEO:
Just as we explained above, in order to survive through these updates and changes; you need to focus on the points that Google is trying to make you realize (If not directly of-course). All in all, a search is becoming a social strategy and your brand, your reputation is becoming more important. The competition and race is becoming tougher and Google is providing everyone the chance to step up. Author Rank is a huge opportunity for smaller websites to show themselves and rank higher, if their content is of good quality. Furthermore, one thing that you cannot deny is the fact that a nice picture for author profile can take hits by just standing out in the search engine. If image can develop trust, then Author Rank is just doing that for you.
How To Start Authorship:
In order to start using this authority algorithm, you need to create an account with Google+. Once it’s created, you would need to assign the account with site’s author. Your website would need author mark up and you can do that. The code shown below is what you need to add to the page or blog for which you need author rich snippet to display in SERPs:
<a href=”https://plus.google.com/google+id /about?rel=author”>+Author Name</a>
You will have to change few things though. Replace Google+ id and Author name with actual account details, furthermore, you can create an author badge within Google+ account and embed it in blog. Your use of WordPress can manage many things; it can implement Google authorship code with simple plug-ins.
Google Authorship is soon to change many things especially for bigger websites. If you have doubts for the rankings, then just remember Google is taking steps to make things right what you need to do is focus on quality and wait. A 2012 research study shows that 17% of search queries include at least 1 search result with authorship markup. If that’s case, have you given a thought on this?
