Google Authorship Is Big Are You Ready?

Online marketing and web site promotion has become such a large beast, that Google among many other online giants have to keep changing very often to stay ahead of cheaters and those who are constantly trying to game the system.

The fact that most people who are trying to build an online business do not want to spend the time to grow their business like a traditional brick and mortar business.

Most online marketers are looking for a easy way to make money, this has created many problems on the web and many of the biggest web authorities are spending a lot of time and money to make sure that the best websites, products and content are promoted naturally.

Social Gets Big And You Need To Be Using It

The problems that we talked about in the intro, led to Google, Bing and other huge online authorities to start putting more emphasis on content that was generated by people on social networks because this was their only metric that they could use as the "human factor". Now, don't think that this is going away, it has been very successful because even spammers can only get limited reach using these social networks. People are pretty quick to spot B.S. these days and they do not share it!

So, this means a couple of things. Number one, if you are not already using social as part of your marketing machine, you are going to be screwed and number two, if you are already using social media you can't stop. The same concept of link building applies here. If you see a bunch of buzz one day and then its gone, well Google is just going to figure that the herd has moved on. So don't just drop 50 tweets one day and then come back in a month, this is bad form for sure.

If you have been using Twitter and Facebook thinking that it is enough, you are probably right, but there are hundreds of other very popular and pretty big social media sites that you can expand your business by simply creating some new accounts and of course interacting.

Google Authorship, It's Kind Of A Big Deal!

OK, so what is Google Authorship anyhow? Well Google Authorship is a simple way for Google to start actually tracking and then rewarding or penalizing authors. Many people publish content under a bunch of different pen names and the reason for this is that many people are gray hat or black hat marketers and don't know it. In the past people thought that Google really wanted to see content from many different people talking about one subject to get ranked. Well, this may have been true, but in the real world, people who are affiliated with a site or an online project are much more likely to talk about it than others and Google knows this. So, authorship is a simple new method for google to follow you on the web, see what sites you post on and follow what content you are generating across the internet.

This may sound scary if you are using paid tools to blast hundreds of articles out every day, but if you a real content producer, then this is really a very exciting change. Google is glad to reward those who create unique, rich, fresh content often, just make sure that you are really the author of the content that you connect to.

How Do I Get Listed Or Cited As An Author In Google's Eyes?

There are a couple ways that you can force Google to give you author recognition and hopefully reward you big, for your continued effort to share useful and fresh content to the world. You can connect a web site, blog or Web 2.0 property that you are a contributor to on your Google+ profile, this is actually brand new, but the groundwork to make this work has been here since they first implemented Google Profiles way before we had heard about their social network Google+ coming out.

If you want to connect your web sites to your Google+ profile, just follow the link below to learn how:
https://plus.google.com/authorship

You can also use meta tags to send signals to Google about the authors of each post or the whole website. This may be an outdated method now that the above mentioned is in full effect, but there are some cases that  it may be more appropriate (guest blogging and so on) for you to still use this methodology to get credit for your cited work online.

To see how to use meta tags to signify authorship check out this link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/authorship-markup-and-web-search.html

Oh, I Almost Forgot The Most Important Thing!

You get your picture in the search results! Yes, part of this system will automatically put your picture and some other juicy details about your followers and so on, in a small snippet that is being called "rich snippets" in the actual search results of google.

To see what I am talking about follow this link for Google's own explanation:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

I hope you enjoyed the read and make sure to subscribe to this blog by clicking the black hover button at the top right of the page and please, please follow me on my Google+ profile.

To Success,

Nick Simpson