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”.
Google launched its authorship program last year, which allows authors to get more enhanced listings in the search results by using the rel=author markup.
This is something we have done for many of the staff and guest writers on this blog, and it’s (generally) easy to set up.
Here are five reasons why you should try this on your site…
The use of the rel=author markup to create enhanced listings in Google’s SERPs is growing, with 13% of searches now showing author images in the top 100 results.
These stats come from a Searchmetrics study, which looked at Google UK search results relating to 1m popular keywords.
The enhanced listings make search results more visible, and are likely to be used as in indicator of trust by Google in future.
Google launched its authorship program last year and, using the “rel=author” markup, authors are given a more prominent listing in the SERPS.
Implementing this is relatively easy to do (some useful instructions here) and it has the potential to improve CTR through enhanced search results.
But how significant is this now, and how will Google use this in future?
I asked several search experts for their views….