Rel="author" - This could be KickAss!
-
Google is now encouraging webmasters to attribute content to authors with rel="author". You can read what google has to say about it here and here.
A quote from one of google's articles....
When Google has information about who wrote a piece of content on the web, we may look at it as a signal to help us determine the relevance of that page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, though, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality.
I am guessing that google might use it like this..... If you have several highly successful articles about "widgets", your author link on each of them will let google know that you are a widget expert. Then when you write future articles about widgets, google will rank them much higher than normal - because google knows you are an authority on that topic.
If it works this way the rel="author" attribute could be the equivalent of a big load of backlinks for highly qualified authors.
What do you think about this? Valuable?
Also, do you think that there is any way that google could be using this as a "content registry" that will foil some attempts at content theft and content spinning?
Any ideas welcome! Thanks!
-
I own a company and usually write my own blogs but not every time. The times I don't I pay to have them written and thus own the copy. Can an author be a company and the link point to the company about us page?
-
To anyone following this topic... A good thread at cre8asiteforums.com
-
Pretty sure both say they are interchangeable.
-
I was wondering if this is needed? Doesn't the specfication at schema.org cover this? Or would Google use the Author itemscope different from rel="Author"?
-
Right now, rel="author" is only useful with intra-domain URLs. It does not "count" if you are linking to other domains.
BUT...
In the future it might, so doing this could either give you a nice head start, or not. Time will tell.
-
I think it's a good idea and may open up some content syndication options that were discounted before...
In the past I have been firmly against content syndication - I want the content on my own site. However, if I think that the search engines are going to give me credit for doing it then I might do it when a great opportunity arrives.
-
I think it's a good idea and may open up some content syndication options that were discounted before (as per Dunamis' post) however I've not see the rel tag do much for me.
Tagging links to SM sites as rel="me" has not helped those pages get into the SERPs for my brand (though I've not been super consistent with doing it), rel="nofollow" obviously had the rug pulled from under it a while ago and I even once got carried away and tried linking language sites together with rel="alternate" lang="CC" but didn't get the uplift in other language version sites I hoped (though it was a bit of a long shot to begin with).
I'm just wondering how much value this is going to have. I still like it in principal and will attempt to use it where I can.
-
Or, the other issue could be that content sites could grab content from a non-web-savvy site owner. If the original owner didn't have an author tag, then the content site could slap their own author tag on and Google would think that they were the original author.
-
However, it wouldn't be hard for Google to have a system whereby they recognize that my site was the first one to have the rel author and therefore I'm likely the original owner. This is basically a content registry.
Oh.... I really like that. I would like to see google internally put a date on first publication. One problem that some people might have is that their site is very new and weak and content scrapers hit them with a higher frequency than googlebot.
-
When I read it, I understood it to mean that the author tag was telling google that I was the original author. (I actually thought of you EGOL as I know you have been pushing for a content registry). Now, if someone steals my stuff I wouldn't expect them to put a rel author on it. However, I can see a few ways that the tag may be helpful:
-I recently had someone want to publish one of my articles on their site. I said no because I didn't want there to be duplicates of my stuff online. But, perhaps with rel author I could let another site publish my site as long as it is credited to me. Then, Google will know that my site deserves to be the top listing for this content.
-If I have stuff that I know scrapers are going to get, I can use the rel-author tag. My first thought was that a scraper site could sneakily put their own rel author on it and claim it as theirs. However, it wouldn't be hard for Google to have a system whereby they recognize that my site was the first one to have the rel author and therefore I'm likely the original owner. This is basically a content registry.
-
This might be helpful for you, especially if you can get the syndication sites to place author tags on the blog posts.
rel=canonical might also be worth investigating.
I am also confused about this. I'd like to see more information from Google on exactly how these will be used - especially in cross-domain situations.
-
I actually have similar questions about this. The company I work for hosts a blog that is also syndicated across 4 to 5 other websites. The other sites have bigger reach on the web and our blog isn't getting much direct traffic out of this. I have a feeling adding the author tags to our content will eventually pay off to show that the content is being originated on our site and then syndicated. I am interested / excited to see other ways this will be used. I think its a great fix for the scraping issue and will hopefully prevent needing panda updates X.X
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Sudden increase in backlinks with "Link Reclamation": Any risk from Google?
Hi all, We failed to redirect the links of our old website versions to new website pages for years and we are planning to now redirect all those old links to new in the process of link reclamation. This activity may increase the back links suddenly or steadily. If there is sudden increase in backlinks, will it hurts us? What's Google's stand? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
What does it exactly means when Google brings the "brand name" to the beggining of the page title in search results when it was actually given at the end?
We see many times...page titles starts with "brand name: page for etc" where actually "brand name" has been given at the end and keywords at beginning. Why does Google make this change? I noticed this happens when similar title tags are used by multiple websites for high difficulty keywords. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Website and landing pages - Proportionate authority
Does website's (homepage) ranking going to influence landing pages ranking or vice-versa? If the homepage is ranking good for a "keyword", will that improve ranking of other landing pages which are optimised for related "keywords" & Vice-versa?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Is having an identical title, h1 and url considered "over optimization"? Is it better to vary?
To get some new pages out without over-thinking things, I decided to line up the title tag, h1 tag and URLs of my pages exactly. They are dynamically generated based on the content the user is viewing (internal search results pages) They're not ranking very well at the moment, but there are a number of factors that are likely to blame. But, in particular, does anyone know if varying the text in these elements tends to perform better vs. having them all identical? Has there been any information from Google about this? Most if not all of the "over optimization" content I have seen online pertains to backlinks, not on-page content. It's easy to say, "test it!" And of course, that's just what I'm planning to do. But I thought I would leverage the combined knowledge of this forum to see what information I could obtain first, so I can do some informed testing, as tests can take a while to see results. Thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | ntcma0 -
3 Subdomains - Can their authority or ranking affect each other?
HI, We have 3 different subdomains that target completely different industries.
Algorithm Updates | | danialniazi
a.example.com - school reviews
b.example.com - healthcare reviews
c.example.com - car reviews Q1: If any of the above subdomains gets demoted or penalized by Google would that affect the other subdomains? Q2: Moving forward with all the new changes in SEO, penalties, etc; would it be wise to utilize 3 subdomains for different industries or should we consider getting separate domains?0 -
Measuring Author Rank
It's pretty clear that "AuthorRank" is going to be a big thing for SEO. Although the main principles seem to be pretty straightforward (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building) what I'm less clear about is how we can start to think about author influence as a measurable metric. Webmaster tools gives us Author Stats as an impact on the site's impressions/CTR, but how do we measure the influence of an individual author? Are those factors even defined? Will we get to a stage where authors can be given a Klout-like score for Google Authorship? If not that, how will it look? This will be a HUGE question to solve for future content development strategies, and is something I'm thinking a lot about right now. Best, Matt.
Algorithm Updates | | MattBarker3 -
New Google "Knowledge Graph"
So according to CNN an hour ago regarding new Google update: "With Knowledge Graph, which will begin rolling out to some users immediately, results will be arranged according to categories with which the search term has been associated" http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/16/tech/web/google-search-knowledge-graph/index.html?hpt=hp_t3 Does this mean we need to start optimizing for Categories as well as Keywords?
Algorithm Updates | | JFritton0 -
How Do I Make My Google SERP "SiteLinks" more relevant?
I have a shopping website with thousands of products, and the sitelinks that google has chosen for me (for a long time) are random product pages, which makes no sense to me. I do not emphasize those products on the home page, and I have a sitemap that clearly lists the directory of all the categories. I also added a "nofollow" attribute to almost every link on the home page that is not important. These products in the site links seem completely random and there isnt even a sitelink for "about" or any of the footer content! What gives? Also, my sitelinks never updated to the new, better version. Any suggestions?
Algorithm Updates | | cDNAInteractive0