Google’s latest “Authorship” patent

Google authorship continues to be a hot topic. In late Feb 2013, the internet giant had another search engine ranking page (SERP) related US Patent Application published:

United States Patent Application: 0120265755 »

Factors, for authorship, are including ‘Reputation Score’, ‘Author Ranking’ and ‘Weighted Ranking’. All of which are based partly on reviews of the content by authors and the status level of these reviewing authors.

Great marketers know that regularly producing and publishing good quality content helps your search engine ranking page SERP and supports your marketing endeavours. Retaining credit for your work, against so much scraping and spinning of content on the internet, is a challenge.

Google authorship is a definitive move in the right direction towards authors retaining ownership of their work and getting recognition where due. It allows identification of the original creator of content and the build up of authorship reputation and ranking.

To hear about getting ‘authorship’ set up from Google themselves - have a look at this video from Matt Cutts and Othar Hannson:

Matt Cutts on REL=AUTHOR HTML5 TAG

Did you catch Othar Hansson mentioning ‘triggers’ in the google algorithms?

Basically, if you have your google authorship setup correctly and the bi-directional links in place – it is still not guaranteed your google plus profile picture will display alongside your content listed in a search engine result page. Google are continually challenging us!

Othar, more than once, also drew attention to content management systems (CMS), How easy is it for you to set this up? Do you need to consult your webmaster every time you have a new article or blog post to publish on your website?

In Google’s prime focus to give the user the best experience and quality content, it will not be a surprise that Google Authorship will continue to be a hot topic through 2013.

By Christine Kinch

Disclaimer: The above are my own opinions and not necessarily those of my employer.