Google Authorship May Be Dead, But Author Rank Is Not

Google Authorship and Author Rank aren't the same thing. Here's why Google Authorship can die yet Author Rank lives on.

Google ended its three-year experiment with Google Authorship yesterday, but the use of Author Rank to improve search results will continue. Wait — you can have Author Rank without Google Authorship? And just what is Google Authorship versus Author Rank? Come along, because they are different things — and Author Rank lives on.

What Google Authorship Was

Google Authorship was primarily Google’s way to allow the authors of content to identify themselves for display purposes. You asserted it by making use of “markup,” code hidden from human view but within web pages. Google extended from this original idea to link it tightly with Google+, as a step to create a Google-controlled system of identifying authors and managing identities.
Those making use of Google Authorship were largely rewarded by having author names and images appear next to stories. That was the big draw, especially when Google suggested that stories with authorship display might draw more clicks. Here’s an example of how it looked:

Above, you can see how the listing has both an image of the author plus a byline with the name.
Google ended Google Authorship yesterday. The image support was dropped in June; now the bylines and everything else related to the program are gone. It’s dead.
The markup people have included in their pages won’t hurt anything, Google tells us. It just will be ignored, not used for anything. But before you run to remove it all, keep in mind that such markup might be used by other companies and services. Things like rel=author and rel=me are microformats that may be used by other services (note: originally I wrote these were part of Schema.org, but they’re not — thanks to Aaron Bradley in the comments below)
We’re planning to explore that issue more in a future article, about whether people who invested time now largely wasted adding authorship support should invest more time removing it. Stay tuned.

What Author Rank Is

Separately from Google Authorship is the idea of Author Rank, where if Google knows who authored a story, it might somehow alter the rankings of that story, perhaps give it a boost if authored by someone deemed trustworthy.
Author Rank isn’t actually Google’s term. It’s a term that the SEO community has assigned to the concept in general. It especially got renewed attention after Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt talked about the idea of ranking verified authors higher in search results, in his 2013 book, The New Digital Age:

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

For further background on Author Rank, as well as the context of Schmidt’s quote, see my article from last year: Author Rank, Authorship, Search Rankings & That Eric Schmidt Book Quote.

Author Rank Is Real — And Continues!

Schmidt was just speculating in his book, not describing anything that was actually happening at Google. From Google itself, there was talk several times last year of making use of Author Rank as a way to identify subject experts and somehow boost them in the search results:

• Google Authority Boost: Google’s Algorithm To Determine Which Site Is A Subject Authority, May 2013
• Google’s Matt Cutts: Someday, Perhaps Ranking Benefits From Using Rel=”Author”, June 2013
• Google Still Working On Promoting Subject-Specific Authorities In Search Results, December 2013

That was still all talk. The first real action came in March of this year. After Amit Singhal, the head of Google Search, said that Author Rank still wasn’t being used, the head of Google’s web spam team gave a caveat of where Author Rank was used: for the “In-depth articles” section, when it sometimes appears, of Google’s search results.

Author Rank Without Authorship

Now that Google Authorship is dead, how can Google keep using Author Rank in the limited form it has confirmed? Or is that now dead, too? And does this mean other ways Author Rank might get used are also dead?
Google told us that dropping Google Authorship shouldn’t have an impact on how the In-depth articles section works. Google also said that the dropping of Google Authorship won’t impact its other efforts to explore how authors might get rewarded.
How can all this be, when Google has also said that it’s ignoring authorship markup?
The answer is that Google has other ways to determine who it believes to be the author of a story, if it wants. In particular, Google is likely to look for visible bylines that often appear on news stories. These existed before Google Authorship, and they aren’t going away.
This also means that if you’re really concerned that more Author Rank use is likely to come, think bylines. That’s looking to be the chief alternative way to signal who is the author of a story, now that Google has abandoned its formal system.

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Fun Google Search Easter Eggs Work With Query Refinements

Here are some Google Easter Egg search queries you can use to mess with your friends.

Google is a big fan of doing easter eggs, and we’ve covered many of them in the past including ones that mess around with the display of the search results listing page. They include the do a barrel roll and blink HTML examples.
But did you know they work with query refinements, as well? Because of that, you can really mess around with your friends using Google.
For example, one of your friends tells you “my head is spinning.” Why not send them to a search result page that triggers the [do a barrel roll] query but displays results for the query [my head is spinning]. Here is an animated GIF of what they would see:

 

 

Or what if they complain about eye problems? Send them to a search result for the blink html easter egg but for the search query [eye problems]. Here is an animated GIF of what they would see:

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Bing Gets Technical: Rolls Out Code, Software Download & Microsoft-Related Search Updates

Bing Gets Technical: Rolls Out Code, Software Download & Microsoft-Related Search Updates

Aiming to make its search results more “developer friendly,” Bing says it has streamlined API, code and non-alphanumeric queries, made software download searches safer and added instant answers to the top of search results for Microsoft-related technology queries.

Using a side-by-side comparison against Google search results for a “c# hashtag example” query, Bing illustrated how code-related searches on Bing now include the actual code near the top of the results:

The search engine says it is also paying attention to queries with non-alphanumeric characters, such as “::(scope), ++(operators), and () (function):

Bing has given special treatment to such technical queries, so that the context is preserved and we show relevant results on top.

In addition, Bing has updated software related searches as well. Using factors like cost, download site, reviews, related products and safety, Bing claims it delivers more relevant and safer software results from reliable sources.

As an example, Bing used a search for Audacity software to show how its entity pane includes a product description with the software’s official logo, cost information, trusted download links and product reviews:

Making sure not to leave its own product out of the loop, Bing also launched instant answers for Microsoft technology related queries.

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6 Changes We Always Thought Google Would Make to SEO that They Haven't Yet - Whiteboard Friday

From Google's interpretation of rel="canonical" to the specificity of anchor text within a link, there are several areas where we thought Google would make a move and are still waiting for it to happen. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand details six of those areas. Let us know where you think things are going in the comments!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
 

 

 Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, I'm going to tackle a subject around some of these changes that a lot of us in the marketing and SEO fields thought Google would be making, but weirdly they haven't.
This comes up because I talk to a lot of people in the industry. You know, I've been on the road the last few weeks at a number of conferences -- Boston for SearchLove and SMX Munich, both of which were great events -- and I'm going to be heading to a bunch more soon. People have this idea that Google must be doing these things, must have made these advancements over the years. It turns out, in actuality, they haven't made them. Some of them, there are probably really good reasons behind it, and some of them it might just be because they're really hard to do.
But let's talk through a few of these, and in the comments we can get into some discussion about whether, when, or if they might be doing some of these.

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Google’s Matt Cutts: We Can Improve Our Algorithms For Authorities On Topics

In an interesting video released by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, Matt answers the question on how Google separates the concept of popularity from authority.

The truth is, he answered that question quickly by saying popularity and authority are two different things. The example he gave was that porn sites are often way more popular than government or organization sites but government sites are often more authoritative than porn sites. So the two concepts are different.

Matt then explained in more detail the concept of being popular within a topic, or maybe being more authoritative within a topic. So by query or class of query, how does Google determine which site is more relevant or authoritative for a query.

Matt said that Google is working on new algorithms to do a better job at that. He said Google showing sites that “actually have some evidence that it should rank for something related to medical queries. And that is something where we can improve the quality of the algorithm even more.”


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SEO Strategy Has Changed, But Has Your Reporting Structure?

As SEOs, we all generate ranking reports for our keywords on a regular basis. Maybe weekly or monthly,  but we all do it at some point. With so many changes in the last few years (or months, even!)  do you really think ranking reports are the only metric to track SEO efforts? I don’t think so, because:

1. Now SEOs have to use lots of keywords variation while doing link acquisition, because exact match anchor keywords can be dangerous.
2. Google moved entirely to secure search and stopped providing keywords data in all Analytics tools
3. Hummingbird update has changed the way it serves results. Now Google understands the user search queries and serves the results based on its understanding, instead of just keywords typed-in.

With these updates, how can a small ranking report of ONLY targeted keywords prove SEO efforts? It cannot. Efforts of SEOs are no longer limited to targeted keywords, so why should we limit our reporting?

Difference between Old Reporting and New Reporting

As a SEO, you put effort into increasing accessibility, content marketing, quality link acquisition, and generating social signals just to get rankings in search engines. But these efforts also help websites get referral traffic (if quality content marketing or link acquisition is done) and increase in brand awareness (if social media strategies are successful). Also, when using diversity of keywords in on-page and off-page optimizations, you also help increase search engine rankings for other (non-targeted) keywords. Are you all reporting these metrics to your clients or bosses? If not, you are undervaluing yourself and your work.
So, how do you make sure you are reporting all of the benefits of your work? The reports I recommend for any SEO Campaign are as follows.

Activities Report

Pretty self explanatory, but often overlooked. This report should include all the activities you completed. For example, what content you marketed and where, what infographics you distributed and where, and any other action you took that resulted in benefits for the client. 

Monthly Activities Reporting

Ranking Report

Ranking Report should not be limited to targeted keywords, but must be on wider scale.

• For Example: If you are targeting “Sport Shoes”, and while optimization you also use different variations like “white sport shoes” and “red sport shoes”, then you should also include them in your ranking report.

Targeted + Variations of Keywords Ranking Reporting

Total Reach Report

This should include direct, referral, and search traffic. Why? Because your efforts may help increase brand awareness, so direct traffic and content and social media marketing referral traffic would increase as well.

Direct + Referrals + Search Engines Traffic Reporting

Endorsements Report

This report should include increases in the total number of backlinks, domain and page authority, increase in social engagement, etc.

Above Graph Shows Number of Links Increased, and Below Graph Shows Number of Facebook Likes Increased

Conversions Tracking Report

For every business, conversion is the ultimate goal. So, this is one of the most important metrics to track and report. It can be based on the number of inquiries, average time on site, decrease in bounce rate, and so forth.

Increase in number of Leads (contact request, quote request, etc.)

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Hiding From That Google Penalty? It May Find You At Your New Home

Did you know that even if you try to run away from your Google penalty, it might end up finding you anyway? In a recent Google Webmaster Hangout, hosted by Google’s John Mueller, John said that even if you move your penalized site to a new domain name and don’t redirect the penalized site, Google may still find it and pass along the bad signals.                                                                

In the video, 23 minutes in, John answers my question about penalties following sites. He said that if the site is extremely similar and you simply move the site from domain A to domain B, that Google may pick up on the site move without you even giving them signals of the move. So even if you do not set up 301 redirects or use the change address tool in Google Webmaster Tools, Google may indeed know that you moved from domain A to domain B and pass along all the signals.

In that case, if a site is penalized, simply moving it to a new domain name might not be enough. You might have to go the extra mile and rebuild the site, content and user interfaces to convince Google it really is a new site.

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