Google Wants to See You Everywhere… Well, everywhere that matters
10 years ago it was easy to get ranked because not that many people were doing it. Search engine optimization was a new technique that not many knew about and those that were, were finding shortcuts, loopholes, and ways to scam the system. Those that were really trying and did up getting pushed to the back of the line while people that were breaking the rules were soaring to the first page.
Google has been trying to filter out those that break and bend the rules for years making it harder for spammers, scammers and black hat SEO consultants to get the job done. It’s rewarding those that truly have important information, authoritative knowledge, and do the grunt work in order to get their information out there.
Google loves it when we use their tools, we all know that. The more we use their tools the better they seem to like it and the biggest one right now is Google authorship and author rank.
So what’s the difference between authorship and author rank?
Authorship is about connecting your web content and information from your website to your personal Google plus page. This creates a more personal connection between what you’re writing in what you’re selling to who you really are. Authorship will include your headshot and a link to your profile plus more information about you, your social media, and how to get a hold of you. Authorship is connecting you to your website rather than having a big company and making the website this big, unknown entity that no one can personally connect with. The people and your clients want to know that there’s a real person behind the content they can connect with.
Google author rank refers to the credibility of the author; How your authorship ranks according to others in your industry. Google is always looking for better ways to identify quality content and by ranking it the can weed out the spammers and identify the experts in a particular category.
The benefits of Google authorship are when someone searches for your topic they find your image next to your article. This creates a connection even though it’s just online. People feel drawn to an image or picture of a person rather than an unknown wall of words.
However, those that spend the time to really hone their knowledge of the specific industry or topic may not have the time to spend upping their authorship and chasing down the latest SEO rules. The simply are experts because they are experts and because of that, Google will rank them as such.
All this being said, it’s still important to have authorship on your content connected with your Google plus account. Social media is important and although Google does not track Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others, using social media to get your information out means more of a chance of it being shared, linked to, and viewed by more people.