For the past few months, there has been a lot of hullabaloo in the world of SEO. With Penguin 2.0, the latest Google algorithm, hovering overhead, the search mavens are left with no choice other than dealing with the new rules of the game. Though Google’s Penguin 2.0 update might not have been the squall that most professionals and website owners anticipated, it has still managed to tumble the SERPs of many websites, thereby leaving the most upright websites with a positive rise in the SERPs.
Now, most developers and SEO professionals have finally agreed that there is no shortcut to trick Google and rank high in the search results. Apart from the traditional ethical techniques, the new concept of protecting the original website content from spammers and scrapers, while building the user’s trust in the website and increasing the authority is gaining widespread popularity.
Google has always been a leader in the world of the internet; and with the new Google Authorship system, it has managed to take a leap ahead in building a website’s authority in the best possible manner. Google Authorship is an important aspect of the Google+ functionality that mainly affects the rankings by colliding content, SEO and branding for boosting authority and establishing distinct ownership.
What is Google Authorship?
Google Authorship is more than simply associating the author’s picture with the content visible in the search results. In simple words, it is a Google’s method of knowing the author’s identity and proving it with the content for the users to recognize. It is somewhat similar to Google’s Author Rank algorithm, which actually filters the search results as per the credibility of the website or the content author.
How Google Authorship Can Prove Beneficial?
Google Authorship adds the Google+ profile picture to the content, which is likely to attract more click-through-rates as compared to the content without a picture. Apart from increasing the web traffic, Google Authorship helps in increasing the SEO rankings, thereby enhancing the website’s overall credibility. Not only the website or the company on the whole, but individual authors or website owners can also gain widespread recognition and build trust and authority online.
When talking about authority on the web, the higher it is, the more legitimate the associated things will appear. If Google believes that a website or an author has a good authority in a particular niche, it will provide the highest authority results to the users searching for that niche, thereby generating more traffic for a website. It will not only generate search specific results, but will also provide the links of all the published blogs and articles by the author.
Apart from this, it also helps in dealing with the unfortunate dark side of easily accessible content – plagiarism. Google Authorship helps in ensuring that the content is accredited in the name of the original author and safeguards it from being ripped off by spammers and content scrapers.
Setting up Google Authorship
Google Authorship is relatively simple to set up, regardless of whether the website is powered by any popular CMS or is built using HTML. There are two ways of creating Google Authorship with the Google Plus profile. While the first method involves verifying the email address (web domain email), the second method includes adding direct links from the content page in the profile.
If an author or website owner eyes on becoming an expert in the specific niche, utilizing the power of content and Google Authorization for building a high author rank is the ideal way. Now is the perfect time to jump into this stream and start building a good reputation in the virtual world.
Abey John
Hey Arjun, Great timely article. Content. High quality content is going to be/if not already is the watchword and G+ authorship tags helps there. Would be good if you can also link to the different authorship setup methods.
yuvraj wadhwani
Hi Arjun,
Good and timely advice. Would you highlight some points about the more recent ‘hummingbird’ update if you have some?
Yuvraj
Jitendra Gursingh
Hi Arjun,
As Abey sir mentioned, truly an informative & most importantly, a timely article. Companies who always stuck to creating remarkable content continue to be unaffected by Penguin, Panda or any other P update 🙂
I have been reading on Content & Inbound Marketing since quite some time. I believe it was Google’s incorrect approach of giving extremely high undue importance to the number of links & keywords in a page to determine its ranking. This approach gave birth to thousands of fly-by-night SEO agencies who went about increasing & growing links at a rate which put India’s population growth rate to shame.
However, the Authorship project is still unclear I feel. For e.g. If an agency writes on the client’s behalf, who should ideally show up in the Authorship ranking? Also, this determines an author’s importance first, which in turn determines the site ranking. How will Authoriship be determined for sites directly?
But all said & done, Google Authorship is a great step in the right direction which finally gives more importance to the content rather than links & keywords.
Abey John
Jitendra (drop the sir! :)) in case of the Agency the authorship markup should be tagged to somebody on staff at the company. The agency is just a “ghost” in this case.
Authorship is at article level. This fits in with Google’s general approach to SERPs: “Google ranks pages, not sites.”
Google looks for the publisher tag at site level but as far I’ve heard this does not contribute anything much to the ranking algo.
@yuvraj Didnt know about the latest update. Hummingbird FAQ here: https://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816.
This looks more like a formal announcement for all the changes they’ve been rolling out over the past few months. The core “wisdom of the crowd” algo is still intact. What we are seeing is primarily some rudimentary early alpha AI. The google toilet is not far away 🙂
Jitendra Gursingh
Ok Abey, no Sir 🙂
Thanks a lot for the replies..a lot more clear on Google Authorship now 🙂
And the Google Toilet video is HILARIOUS!! 😀 😀
Arjunsinh Chandravat
Hello Abey John,
Thanks for your time & appreciation . Glad you liked the post. I will for sure update the post & add some other methods of setting up authorship.
Arjunsinh Chandravat
Hello Yuvraj,
Thanks for your time & going through my post. I will surely soon update new post with your desired topic “hummingbird”
Good Day
Amit Shroff
Abey,
I have read about Google’s Hummingbird, but couldn’t understand something like. If you search Wallpaper for Home, you will find Print a Wallpaper link at 8 or 9th place, but you search for wallpaper for homes you will not find it on top 100 even.
Why does this happen..!!
I saw a result https://homesthetics.net/20-extraordinary-smart-diy-paper-wall-decor-free-template-included/ this is something not related to wallpaper by any chance but still appear..
This is really strange…