Google Authorship has been around for a few years, and it has been getting increasingly popular since its release. In December of 2013, Google took it up a notch with the new Authorship Markup feature in search engines.
So what is Google Authorship?
It’s a way to take articles and internet publications that you’ve written or contributed to and link them to your Google+ account. You may have noticed photos of people showing up in search engine results more and more lately.
Why is that a good thing?
It’s a way to earn credibility, establish yourself or your website as a resource of information in your given niche, and help you increase domain authority. Like any other Google product, Authorship is continually evolving to help users and publishers while penalizing websites that publish spammy or pointless content to try and garner unearned traffic.
Google Authorship Markup example: I did a search on the phrase “How do I start a blog?” and Google came back with these results.
Of the top six in the results page, four of them have Authorship Markup. The author’s name, picture, Google+ circles amount, and in one case, links to other articles the author wrote on related topics.
Search engines, specifically Google, have been telling businesses and website owners for years to publish quality content that someone would see as a valuable resource for information. To achieve better rankings in search engines, a website has to be credible. There are many many ways to earn credibility, but quality content has been and will continue to be at the top of the list.
Besides the rewards for good writers and publishers, it’s also a fun way to blast low quality content writers that are just publishing for the sake of publishing in an attempt to gain traffic.
The great news with this new markup feature is that if your company has been publishing quality content, or already have established some credibility in your niche or field, this can help you exponentially build on that.
We continue recommending that authors properly implement authorship to help users discover their content more easily in Search and other Google products. Continue focusing on creating great content that people want to read and share and the rest will follow. –Google
Bad news is that if your business hasn’t been publishing content regularly or even started yet, then you’ve got some catching up to do.
Next week, we’ll go into how you can set up your Google+ account and link it to your website in order to get Google Authorship working for you, and maximize the chances that your picture will appear next to each piece you publish.