Google Plus, Author Rank, Content Marketing, SEO : The Complete Story

By Chetan Bhasin -

Once Facebook had established itself as a great social network there did not seem to be any room left for any other social network on the internet. However, Twitter made it’s way through the hard competition and instantly became popular in eyes of content marketers and SEO gurus.

Despite of Facebook and Twitter’s great interface, audience, and approach there is one thing in which they lack – they’re not search engines. While on the one hand social networks have been a source of shared content for us, on other hand search engines have not compromised their presence in the world while social networks continuously tried to change the way how people discovered what they liked. Again, though, where social networks prove themselves a great tool for content marketing they do not leave much space for SEO.

Google, as we know, is known as internet giant and has always tried to make itself the best (and probably the only) source where people can discover good and useful content. After the failure of Orkut, as a result of their competitive spirit, people at Google came up with this better social network known as Google Plus.

I recently read Brian Jensen’s article about Google authorship and content marketing, and saw that many other bloggers have inspired themselves with Google Plus and the concept of authorship using Google+, so I decided to add one more to their list of opinions with my own views and ideas.

Ever until now, Google’s race in the world of social network seemed to me more than just a willingness to establish a social network better than their competitors. In the process of improving search experience, Google has always been trying new tricks and establishing a new social network seemed to me more like a tool that they can use to analyze user experience with content and hence rank it accordingly.

Um… Or if we see it the other way, is it Google’s new trick to use the Google Authorship as a new way of SEO to promote their personal social networking website? Well! I don’t really know the answer to that question. What I do know is that if you want to be consistent in the competitive world of SEO and content marketing, you must now start using Google Plus for that purpose.

How Google’s Author Rank Works?

Today we’re beginning to support authorship markup—a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We’re experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.

-Google

What Google authorship does is basically to integrate your Google Plus profile with your content pages and use the data obtained by it to determine how good your article is based on several factors. These factors can include the number of times your content has been shared or promoted through Google Plus, how active you are on Google Plus, and what kind of content you usually browse or promote.

Since Google already used to determine through user data what kind of things interest us and used to tailor the search results on its basis, they have now only added a way to link it to your public profile.

Earlier, Google used to build a reputation of websites in its database by understanding how they perform in the long term. However, in this new system Google is allowing you to build your reputation as an individual author and not a website. I believe this step is not only going to give freedom to authors to write openly, but it will also encourage bloggers to want more high profile authors to write as a guest on their blog.

Oh! Don’t forget, though, that if you are writing on every other blacklisted blog and producing the spam content you are ruining your author profile. So, now Google has given you another reason to not be that person who annoys internet surfers with spam content.

In case you’re wondering how to build up trust as an author in the eyes of Google, there are a couple of ways to manage that process. Let me explain in more details…

If you share or promote content published by other authors (more likely, good authors) in the same niche as you, you are telling Google that you enjoy this type of content, which means you are knowledgeable about it. No, I’m not telling you to promote and share only that content which you want Google to know that you like, but you must and should actively participate in those things too which are a little out of your niche. After all, content marketers and bloggers are not machines who enjoy reading only one particular type of content. Moreover, god knows if Google has got an algorithm behind their back which judges if we’re using Google Plus to build the author rank in a black hat way or being a real human (by the way, I really do think that they’ve got something like that).

The other way you get more points to your author rank or author profile is when people promote or share content published by you through Google Plus. Additionally, let me remind you that shares carry more weight than simply clicking on G+ button or promoting through SERPs. I have, personally, seen a great change in how my pages get indexed when they’re shared and/or promoted more on Google Plus, which tells me how serious Google is about the way the system of author rank works.

Now, there is this one very interesting thing that I did not see if most people noticed. While I was doing a search in Ahrefs about my inbound links, I discovered that any links that come from shared content on Google Plus are dofollow links. Mind you, dofollow links are always good in one way or the other if they come from a trusted source like any domain with google.com at the end.

How To Impliment Author Profile On Your Website

I see that I have already taken this article very far, so I won’t go into much detail about implementing Google’s author profile on your website. I will tell you one simple way in which you can include your Google’s author profile on your website.

To tell Google that a certain page is published by you, the only thing that you have to do is by placing your Google Plus profile page link somewhere on the webpage (head section is recommended) with rel=”author” attribute.

Update: I forgot to mention this before, but you also have to verify that you are the owner of that content at your G+ profile. For that you have to go and edit your profile and add the website that you’re writing for.

To implement author profile on a WordPress blog you can simply use plugin Google Author Link.

To read more about implementing Google’s author profile on your website read what Google says.

 

At the end, if you ask me if Author Rank is a good idea, I’ll say yes it is! I like it. What about you?

P.S. Don’t forget to +1 this post on Google!