by Matt Sells of BCCO | Google+
In 2011, Google announced they would be working to link original content and articles with the original author. They wanted to do this to cut down on webspam. Low quality spammers scrape content from the web and re-post it as their own. In some cases, the spammy articles have outranked the original. This is not good for search results or for the companies that work hard to create original content. In May of 2011, Google patented a metric called “Agent Rank”. After this, Google launched Google+ and the Google Authorship program.
Google Authorship
Google Authorship is a program that let’s authors connect themselves to their content, even if the content lives on other websites or blogs not controlled by the author. In most cases, Google will enable the authorship rich snippet for your original content. It will be viewable in the SERPs. This is how it looks:
This is an amazing feature. It helps protect your content and also builds trust between the author and audience.
Google Author Rank
Google Author Rank scores an author for the widely used topics they write about. This score is supposed to affect the ranking of each of those topics. This rank follows the author and can affect all of the posts by the same author.
The Impact
Author Rank may not be all fun and games for everyone. If you have amazing content to share, and do so regularly, you will be rewarded. This is true, especially, if you have been on the web a while and have a lot of solid content. If an author actively shares untrustworthy content or participates in link schemes, Google can track that back to the author and all of the content under that author will be affected. The Panda and Penguin algorithms track the spam and penalize the page or domain. This program will be even more precise. Google is getting smart, very smart.
Right now, Google Authorship is widely used and there have been speculations on what Author Rank will develop into. No one knows the true impact that Author Rank will have in the years to come, but I can say it will be huge. Start solidifying your name as being a publisher of trusted content.
