What is Authorship and How can it help me?
Recently we have talked about the changes in SEO and how we have moved from keyword stuffing, where people used to reproduce a specific keyword on a website to improve rankings, to inbound links – which was causing many website owners to get links from very poor quality websites and link farms.
All the above methods, although innocent in their own right, were sadly abused by people wanting to get higher ranks for their websites. Google have been aware of this, and although no one apart from engineers at Google knows exactly how the search engine indexes and ranks sites, they do give us hints and tips. The main reason for these hints and tips are to educate people as to what Google wants appearing on its search results – basically good quality content. They will never tell us how exactly it is done, as after all it is an algorithm – a computer program, which can be manipulated.
Create quality content – don’t over-optimise!
Google have become very smart at looking for manipulation, for sites that are “over-optimised” and clearly are trying to manipulate search results. Google has a simple philosophy – produce unique, fresh content, which is relevant and interesting to your target audience, and you will be rewarded. It is simple as that.
People still look for shortcuts however. But the way Google is changing means there is sadly no real short cut or quick fix. SEO takes time and gone of the days where you can stick 10,000 links on a very poor quality website and see your search results increase.
Google Authorship
One way Google have overcome this manipulation of its search results is the introduction of Authorship. Authorship is a way of linking an author, an actual human to content. For example if you own a website which offers advanced driving courses then you will no doubt want to rank for a keyword like “advanced driving course”. In the past you would have probably keyword stuffed this word, and try and get lots of easy links to your website. However, although the right kind of links are still important, focusing on Authorship will help further still.
Authorship works by using tags in your website or blogs HTML which links back to a person who is on Google+ This person needs a Google+ personal account which can be linked to the relevant content around the web. Over time if they produce interesting and relevant content on a specific subject, Google will see them as an authority. What better way to rank content on the web than by looking at the actual person who wrote it. It is much harder to manipulate search results if a large part of the indexing process involves ranking an author of content.
The end result
Authorship will make SEO more time consuming, but the results will work better, both in terms of website owners success, as they wont need to worry about being penalized by using underhand methods, and of course the end user of the search engine will benefit, as they will be served up content which has been produced by a genuine authority on a subject, and not content which has been subject to artificial, low value link building.
Acumen Interactive offer full authorship consultancy services as part of their advanced seo services.
