This post is part of a series where I obsess about how marketers need to “feed their data to Google” if they want to be found in the world’s largest search engine. In this first post, I’ll explore why building up author rank (by verifying your identity with Google) is critical to building your online reputation.
Why you need to be aware of schema.org:
All major search engines have adopted a new form of semantic markup for web pages called schema.org. This is a part of a larger shift of search engines from an algorithm based on looking up content based on keywords (with elements of popularity signals and quality content thrown in) to an algorithm that understands entities and the connections between them.
Schema has a huge library of labels that you can add as additional mark up to your web pages – you can label the “book” you’re writing about on your web page a “book”.
There are a few types of schema that have taken off more than others due to the fact that they provide you a rich snippet in search, those that are used for recipes and those that are used to display author information.
The Power of the Author for Ranking (Author Rank):
Google now surfaces information on the first page of search based on the author of the content and the amount of authority and thought leadership that author has online related to the topic the author is writing about. The search engine determines this by whether the author has linked their Google+ profile to their bio on the site/blog where they regularly contribute, and by the signals around the viewership and interactions with that author’s blog posts. This new Google ranking factor is called “Author Rank”, and it allows for the display of author information in search like the example below:
Online contributors who have linked their Google+ profile to their online blog bios become part of the “Google Authorship” project.
This is not a minor change to be ignored.
Google will eventually rank contributors with a large active social presence (and those who have signed up for Google Authorship) over contributors that do
not have a large social media following and who have not signed up for Authorship.
Blog authors with online popularity (high author rank) will drive traffic
It is possible in the future that website traffic from Google will be largely determined on the quality of the blog contributors a site has who have signed
up for authorship.
Current research shows they already do drive more traffic
- According to Greg Boser, President of SEO agency BlueGlass, authors with Google Authorship rich
snippets (like the one above) have clickthrough rates that are 40% greater than normal. - In April, Search Metrics ran an experiment which showed that 1 out of every 5 Google Searches shows rel=author in the top 100 results.
If companies are invested in online thought leadership, they need their spokespeople to sign up for the Google Authorship program.
Any company that is focused on building up online thought leadership, or is thinking about launching a blog that relies on outside blog contributors should consider only recruiting contributors that have social media following or are willing to build one and are amiable to signing up for the Google Authorship program and building a Google+ following.
Have you signed up for Google Authorship? Stay tuned for my next post where I talk about other features of Google+ that should be leveraged by marketers.