Google Now Supports Author Tag: Implications for SEO

[djbaxter]

Google Now Supports ?Author? Tag
by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land
June 7, 2011

Google announced support of the authorship markup, enabling content sites to help identify their authors on the site and across the web.

The markup links up authors to content, for example, this content would be linked up to my name and can be used to find all the stories I?ve written here and on my other sites.

It uses the rel attribute, so all you need to do is add the rel=?author? to your author?s hyperlink on the article page. For example:

[noparse]Written by Matt Cutts.[/noparse]
​

As Google explained, this tells search engines: ?The linked person is an author of this linking page.? The rel=?author? link must point to an author page on the same site as the content page. For example, the page IANA — Example domains could have a link to the author page at IANA — Example domains. Google uses a variety of algorithms to determine whether two URLs are part of the same site. For example, IANA — Example domains, IANA — Example domains, and http://news.example.com can all be considered as part of the same site, even though the hostnames are not identical.

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[djbaxter]

Google?s Authorship Markup and Its Implications for SEO

Google?s Authorship Markup and Its Implications for SEO
by Rob Young, Search Engine Journal
June 8, 2011

Google has been at the forefront of rich markup for search engines, having multiplied both their support for rich data and the portion of the time that rich results are shown. Their recent collaboration with competitors Bing and Yahoo! for schema.org, a site that standardizes and educates about markup language, further demonstrates the company?s enthusiasm. Yesterday (June 7th) Google launched another markup option: Authorship. This new markup may have significant implications for SEO.

Here?s how authorship works: Sites that have large portions of content written by a specific author can denote the author of each piece of content and can specify the author?s page on the site. The author page can then include markup that specifies what select data on the page is. Google can then display portions of the specified data from the search engine results page, giving direct links to the author?s page, other content from the same writer, and other pages that belong to the same author (such as social sites).

This is a great way to specify who wrote content and give some appropriate credit, information, and cross-promotion for that author. However, there are also several implications for SEO:

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