The Importance of Author Rank

Author Rank is a little known factor that Google has been looking at for a while now. You have probably seen its effects but you might not have even realised what you are looking at. If you search a topic and see an author and their picture listed alongside the link then you’ve seen Google’s author system in action. It’s another tool Google has created to help promote quality writing across the web and improve their search results.

The basic idea is that now Google will take the reputation of an author into consideration when ranking a website. If the author has a reputation for quality, Google will boost the rankings of sites that contain this author’s work. It’s all a part of Google’s never ending quest to reward good content and punish poor material. If you are a good writer this will help you out. If you aren’t, you should be practicing or looking into hiring professional writers. Content can no longer be a simple afterthought.

If you want to take advantage of the author rank system, you must first sign up for a Google Plus profile. Google is still doing everything they can do to promote their social network. Try and upload a good picture so people know who they are reading. Then you want to visit plus.google.com/authorship and follow the steps listed to become verified. Next you want to go to your profile and add all the web pages you work on under the “Contributor to” field. This lets Google know which pages contain your authorised work. Then you just have to add an HTML code to your sites connecting the content with your authorship and you’ll be set.

When material written by approved authors shows up on Google it will be accompanied by a link to their Google+ profile. It can also contain a picture of the author. You can imagine the effect this could have on searchers. Out of all the sites that pop up on Google maybe only one has this picture. It’s a fact that people are attracted to human faces. It also makes the content feel more trustworthy. After all, the author is no longer faceless. Searchers are more likely to trust material when they feel like they know something about the person behind it.

Modern SEO needs to be about proving to users and search engines that a website’s content is trustworthy. Author Rank can help you get Google to trust what you’re saying. If you take the time to build up a reputation for quality, it will ultimately pay off. Still, it’s always important to maintain quality. A good Author Rank shouldn’t be seen as a license to allow quality to slip. The whole thing demands more work, but the results will be worth it when it means that every site you work on enjoys the benefit of your good reputation. That’s the sort of thing that could really set an SEO professional apart in the long run.