Authorship is one of the hot topics in SEO at the moment.
Everyone expects authorship to have some value at some point but most people haven’t given it much thought other than reading about how it can get your picture next to your content.
Let’s change that…
This time last year, I took some time to research the topic of rel=”author” for a quick fire talk at BrightonSEO.
This led me to some interesting conclusions around the future of Authorship and its relationship with search engines, particularly in the realms of authors being ranked within a system, which has come to be known as ‘AuthorRank‘.
It has been a full 18 months since we saw the release of Authorship, but in that time, it appears many people in the industry genuinely believe that AuthorRank is in effect.
In reality, they are two different things, and the latter has actually been coined from within the SEO industry – taking from an earlier patent named “Agent Rank”. My argument is that AuthorRank’s role has been overstated, and any potential effect is being overhyped.
At the beginning of this month, I gave a talk on how to increase CTR using rich snippets at SMX Israel.
What I notice that other posts written about rich snippets are more about what new structured data now appear in the SERPs and some actionable development resources.
What I find lacking, which I tried to cover in my talk, was being able to show your client why it’s important to them as a business, not just because “that looks better”.