Google recently announced that they are supporting author markup – code which enables content site to identify the author of content both on the site and across the internet. What does this mean for the web and for SEO? While we do not have any solid information on how the author tag will affect SEO and Google marketing, there are some theories about the implications thereof. But first let’s discuss the rel attribute further.
The author tag uses the rel attribute, so to insert this on your site you would simply as rel”author” to your author’s hyperlink on the article page. To put this visually you would have:
Written by <a rel=”author” href=”../authors/Name Surname”</a>.
This code will alert the search engines to the fact that the linked person is an author of this linking page. The rel=”author” link must link to an author page on the same site as the aforementioned content page. While the URLs used for the content page that features the author tag and the author page may on occasion not be the same, this doesn’t matter because Google’s algorithms will determine whether or not the two pages are from the same parent domain.
So while http://www.forexample.com; http://forexample.com and http://news.forexample.com are all different host names, the Google algorithms will identify them as being part of the same parent domain.
To put this more simply a content page is any piece of content to which an author can be attributed. An author page is about a specific author and must be on the same domain as the content page. While the URLs needn’t be identical, should each of these pages feature the author markup text, the search engines will identify that it is the same author on each of these pages. These pages could also be linked to a profile page on another site, which could in turn link to other pages that have been published by the same author, using an additional relationship tag, rel=”me”, so that the author can be identified and recognised across all of these pages. Currently this feature only works in conjunction with a public Google Profile.
Now you may start to question why Google would want to identify the author of various pages of content, how this can affect SERP rankings and what this will mean for search marketing specialists. By identifying the author through the author markup text, the search engines can identify the quality of the content that is published. If the author churns out pages of uninteresting, uninformative and poorly optimised content then he is likely to be given less authority as an author, and therefore for his content to have less authority.
Consider Twitter which applies an internal quality score to its profiles. While the profile may have a huge number of followers, this does not necessarily mean that it will have a high quality score. In fact, fewer followers with higher levels of authority who retweet your tweets will be more likely to result in a higher authority. The higher authority a profile has the more likely that Google will bring up their tweets in realtime search results – another example of how it is giving credit to the author tag.
Likewise, should you add the author tags to the mix and suddenly a website depends on a lot more than just its own reputation. If the author is linked to a number of other pages with a good reputation then this will give your content page more authority. This could lead to websites having to trade on its authors to provide sufficient valuable links in order to rank well in the SERPs. Authors could capitalize very nicely on this provided they develop authority and a good reputation. However, some websites may include author markup language that links to an author with a good reputation purely to boost search rankings, which means authors will need to worry about infringement in a whole new way. On the other hand, this could also result in a massive increase in guest blogging with authors who have authority being employed to write to manipulate rankings. What were originally paid links could become paid author signals.
The author tag will help the search engines to better identify the authority of the page, and it will also help differentiate between the original author of a piece of content and those who have simply copied and pasted content into another website, thereby creating duplicate content.
No Comments »
I didn’t want to rush into writing a post that Google+ as soon as it was launched. I wanted to be a bit more measured before formulating an opinion of it being a Facebook killer or not.
