Over the past two years, Google, in an effort to constantly improve the usability and usefulness of its search engine, has implemented several significant changes that make our search results more targeted and detailed.
The recent Penguin and Panda updates operated by Google are geared toward promoting a “new” way of understanding of SEO that will be more and more progressively based on the authority of the content proposed. This is why we talk more and more about Reference Building rather than Link Building in which the Rank of a certain content/page will be proportional to its degree of appreciation, sharing and citation by people. The algorithm, which is constantly being refined, will reward in “mathematical” terms the quality of content while at the same time enhancing its Social value given by other Web users. In this sense, shortly after the introduction of rich snippets, there appeared on the official Google Webmaster blog an article by Matt Cutts in which he explained the project of creating a system that would allow the traceability of content to its author and, consequently, the correct attribution of authorship of the work. From this idea was born and evolved the concept of Google Authorship, that is, the method by which it is possible to signal, with a specific marker or process that we will discuss later, that that content is owned by us. In practical terms, search results for a given query will progressively reward those pieces of content that can be traced back to an author identified by name and photo.
The goal of this “tool” is to guarantee the author the best Author Rank i.e. a set of benefits that are obtained through this process among which we can identify:
- increase the CTR to one’s content; as Cutts explained in an interview, “The photo doesn’t just attract attention, it doesn’t just attract clicks, it’s almost like a“trust indicator.”
- establish trust with the public and increase the level of“trust” of one’s name and related content;
- gain recognition and authority in proportion to the worthiness of its content;
- climb its position in SERPs as a result of a combination of factors (Search, CTR, Content and Page Quality, Social factors among the main ones).
Implement the rel=”author” tag
The starting point for proceeding with authorship implantation is to have a public Google Plus Profile with which to link your drafted content; the second aspect to check is the reverse process, i.e., whether content on a certain site “recognizes” you as the author and links back to your G+ profile.
The main methods by which to link a piece of content to an author are 3:
Check with e-mail address
The case: I want to attribute content from www.tun2u.it to the author who has an e-mail address on the same domain, i.e., nomecognome@tun2u.it. The easiest way, in case the e-mail address is on the same domain as the site, is e-mail verification by accessing the specific Google page.
- fill in the fields;
- click on the “Request Content Attribution” button;
- a verification e-mail will be sent to the address you provided, click on the confirmation link;
- at this point you will automatically be associated with the content of that specific domain as a “contributor of.”
Link the content to your Google Plus profile rel=”author”
At the code level, the procedure can be performed just as easily with a basic knowledge of HTML. In fact, it will suffice to link within the article to your signature (photo or text) by following one of these two simple methods:
1: Insert directly into the address specified in the href the parameter rel=”author as query string
<a href="[profile_url]?rel=author">Google</a>2: Use the rel attribute within the “a” tag with the value “author”
<a href="[profile_url]" rel="author">Google</a>An interesting distinction that we can highlight and for which we refer to the comprehensive Search Engine Land article for further discussion concerns two possible procedures related to:
- first hypothesis: use of rel= “me” and rel=”author”;
when? within the site www.nomesito.it, there is a page www.nomesito.it/biografia-autore what happens? www.nomesito.it will be linked to www.nomesito.it/biografia-autore via rel=”author”; the page www.nomesito.en/biography-author will be linked with rel=”me” to my G+ profile page
The link that from the Google Plus profile identifies me as a contributor of should be directed to my author page within the site of which I am an author.
This case often occurs in cases where there are many contributors in a blog, each of whom will have their own dedicated section. - second hypothesis: use of rel=”author”
when? within the site of which we are contributors does not exist our page /biography-author what happens? the page of the site /contenuto.it will be directly linked with rel=”author” to our Google Plus profile; the Google Plus profile will link back to the Home Page of the site or blog as “contributor of”.
link the content to a Google Plus page rel=”publisher”
In Italy it has not yet been activated and indicates the page that owns the publication. The implementation is similar to the profile:
1: Insert directly into the address specified in the href the parameter rel=”publisher” as a query string
<a href="[profile_url]?rel=publisher">Google</a>2: Use the rel attribute within the “a” tag with the value “publisher”
<a href="[profile_url]" rel="publisher">Google</a>First goal: curate Google Plus
From what has been said so far, it is evident how writing quality content within one’s site while remaining a necessary condition, is no longer sufficient. Trivially, the photo and the name (complete with the number of people who have included the author in their Google circles) constitutes an element that immediately captures the user’s attention and, as has already been amply reiterated in every venue by studies focused on identifying direction of gaze/points where users’ attention is focused/attention threshold, the image is often worth more than a hundred words. To make one’s strategy effective, it will be increasingly necessary to take care of one’s Google Plus profile, not only because of its importance at the SEO level but also because:
- Google Plus authorship allows a greater chance that one’s profile will be displayed in Search results with an obvious visibility and personal branding advantage.
- The use of Google authorship is closely related to the authority we attribute to a piece of content. A user will be more likely to be enticed to open a piece of content that he or she knows is authored by a first-person submitter than a generic piece of content. Mark Traphagen explains how “over a broad sample of bloggers with G+ profiles, those who use Google authorship tend to average a full Page Rank higher than those who do not.”
- Google Plus authorship contributes to social media optimization(SMO) of one’s content and SEO. As mentioned in the introduction what becomes increasingly important is the interaction that is created between the author, the content and other people (preferably influential and very active ones).
- Gradually, it will become more and more automatic how interconnected and influential Google Plus will be on the page rank of the website that links to it (featured link in a Google Plus post or linking a Google Plus page to the website).
Only in the next few months, with the upcoming release of rel=”publisher” also for Italy, will we be able to realize (as users) the big change that is in the works, but in order not to be caught unprepared and see months and months of hard work collapse, we need to work in advance.
Stay tuned!