In yesterday's post I mentioned Google Authorship, and the importance of having the same photo on your email signature as you have on your authorship.
But today I want to go a step further with a big bold statement: Authorship is more important than your website because Google is now grading and ranking authors instead of websites.
Brand Consistency
Because you post across your own social media platforms, commenting on other people's blogs and posting and on other people's social media accounts, Google is following and ranking you as a person, not just your website now.
Your Google Footprint
Google now tracks your authority in your industry and will follow the trail of you footprints as you move around from place to place on the web. Then it will aggregate everything you do and pull it all together. Your website will ultimately get ranked by the 'authority' that the author has. This means that an author who has been well ranked by Google will help to raise the profile of any website that they are associated with.
How can you make sure you use this to benefit your business?
This means that the old methods of link building will not be as important as the credibility of the author. However, the one thing that has not changed is the importance of quality content, this is how you will build your authority.
This explains why I am getting daily requests from people to guest blog for me. People want to be associated with me and my site because it has been ranked by Google as an authority site.
Likewise, to improve my rankings, I must associate my work with people who have even better rankings than me so that I can climb the ladder. That's why I was so pleased when Mari Smith retweeted my blog post the other day.
A Complete Social Media Glossary bit.ly/14TlxfI via @brandubrilliant [Test your knowledge!]
- Mari Smith (@MariSmith) May 27, 2013
The third thing that you can do to increase your ranking is to use Google+. It will be the centre of the hub if you like. You will need to connect each of the websites that you write for to Google+ and make sure that you are recognised as the author.
It is also good practice to post your blog posts in Google+ and share them with your connections. This will increase your rankings and connect each thing you do with your authorship.
Google has patented the Author Ranking System
Here is the abstract from the patent:
"The author ranking technique described herein is a technique to rank authors in social media systems along various dimensions, using a variety of statistical methods for utilizing those dimensions.
More particularly, the technique ranks authors in social media systems through a combination of statistical techniques that leverage usage metrics, and social and topical graph characteristics.
In various exemplary embodiments, the technique can rank author authority by the following:
1) temporal analysis of link sharing in which authority is computed based on a user's propensity to provide early links to web pages that subsequently become popular;
2) topical authority based on the author's links and content updates in specific topic areas; and
3) popularity and influence based on nodal properties of authors."
How Can You Build Your Authorship Ranking?
1. Be active on Google+
2. Connect your site(s) to Google+
3. Contribute to conversations in your specialist area in your preferred places like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or other blogs.
4. Be a guest blogger on authority sites in your industry.