Google's Authorship Markup: Bringing Authenticity in Search

Google has always been influencing the way people run their online businesses. Hence it is not surprising that any changes or updates coming out of the Mountain View office in California is viewed with a sort of anxiety and anticipation, more so after the recent Panda update.

Google has been enthusiastic throughout about rich mark-up for search engines. As a continuation of that legacy, this time Google has rolled out, its new feature called "Authorship" markup. Authorship markup is an attempt to recognize the author of particular web content by linking it to a Google Profile, thereby giving more credibility to a webpage or web content showing up in the search results. This new feature will show a thumbnail of your picture alongside search results when applicable and the image will link to your Google Profile page. By attempting to give a ‘human face’ to search results, Google hopes to give more credibility to high quality content and eventually rank search results. In the words of Google Product Manager Sagar Kamdar, “the goal of the feature is to identify and highlight high-quality content".

For those who are new to Google’s Authorship markup, here is how the new feature works. If you are the author of a webpage, blog or web content, Google wants you to link your work to your personal Google Profile page and link it back to the respective page. This way, Google will be able to identify the author of the web content by checking for a connection between the page and the respective Google Profile page. All you need to do is to use the attribute ?rel=author in your link that is pointing to your Google Profile and use a + (plus) character in the anchor text. Add this link anywhere in your source code. Once you add the link, update the Google Profile page by adding the respective link under Links > custom links option.

For example, if I want to author mark this blog content to my Google Profile, I need to add the following link somewhere in the source of this webpage;

<a href=" https://plus.google.com/ my google profile id /

?rel=author">Aravind+</a>

and I need to update this blog link in my Google Profile page.

Google search will display something like the below screenshot, when ?rel=author parameter is added to a page that is being searched.

Google recommends to add the Google Profile link in the following places depending on the type of the content and the number of authors.

A common footer, header, or navigation page that appears on every page, in case of a single-author blog.
The bottom or top of each individual post or article, in case of multiple author blogs or web pages.
An author profile page on your site. For multiple-author sites that have profile pages for each contributor; every article should link to its author's profile page using rel="author" and update each author profile page with a link to that author’s Google Profile.

How authorship can affect page ranks?

So what are the implications of this new Authorship markup? This feature is pretty new and it is too early to assess the exact implications with respect to SEO and page ranking. Analysts are skeptical whether this will have the long lasting impacts of the Panda update, where Google punished mercilessly; those who went back on quality. In the words of Othar Hansson, Google wants to collect information about the credibility of authors from all kinds of sources and will eventually use it in ranking. So as of now, what you can expect is a thumbnail of your photo alongside the search results, linking back to your Google Profile or author page.

But considering Google’s emphasis on extremely high quality content; which we saw during the recent Panda update, it is more than obvious that authorship markup will eventually become an essential tool for search engine ranking. Linking author profiles will also discourage content farms and limit their showing up in search results. Another interesting part is Google’s insistence on a Google Profile to effectively use authorship markup. This will definitely increase the popularity of not only Google Profiles, but also Google +, where Profile is the bread and butter.

So is it time for another change?

During the initial roll out, Google said it is ‘experimenting with this data to help people find content from great authors in search results’. How and when this will actually affect search rankings, is something we have to wait and watch for.

How authorship can affect page ranks?

So is it time for another change?

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