Tag: authorship markup

Were Your Google Authorship Efforts All For Nothing?

Google introduced authorship support over three years ago, leading webmasters and anyone concerned with SEO to jump through a new set of hoops to make sure their faces were visible in Google search results, and hopefully even get better rankings and overall visibility in the long run. Now, Google has decided to pull the plug on the whole thing.

Do you feel that authorship was a waste of time? Are you glad to see it go? Is Google making the wrong move? Share your thoughts in the comments.

To be fair, Google called its authorship efforts experimental in the first place, but for quite a while, it looked like it would play more and more of a role in how Google treated search results, and more specifically, the people providing the content that populates them. Of course Google seems to be relying much less on people (at least directly) for search result delivery these days, favoring on-page “answers” over links to other sites.

Google never came right out and said it would use authorship as a ranking signal to my recollection, but it did go out of its way to really encourage people to take advantage, recording multiple videos on various ways to implement authorship markup on your website. As time went on, they added more ways to implement it, sending a signal that doing so would be in your best interest.

They also added features, such as display of comments, circle counts, etc. They added authorship click and impression data to Webmaster Tools. They dropped the author search operator in Google News in favor of authorship. They added authorship to Google+ Sign-In less than a year ago. It seemed that Google was only valuing authorship more as time went on.

A year ago, Google’s Maile Ohye said, “Authorship annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real person’s perspective or analysis on a topic.” Emphasis added.

Also last summer, Google’s Matt Cutts said, “I’m pretty excited about the ideas behind rel=’author’. Basically, if you can move from an anonymous web to a web where you have some notion of identity and maybe even reputation of individual authors, then webspam, you kind of get a lot of benefits for free. It’s harder for the spammers to hide over here in some anonymous corner.”

“Now, I continue to support anonymous speech and anonymity, but at the same time, if Danny Sullivan writes something on a forum or something like that I’d like to know about that, even if the forum itself doesn’t have that much PageRank or something along those lines,” he added. “It’s definitely the case that it was a lot of fun to see the initial launch of rel=’author’. I think we probably will take another look at what else do we need to do to turn the crank and iterate and improve how we handle rel=’author’. Are there other ways that we can use that signal?”

Before that, he had indicated that authorship could become more of a signal in the future, dubbing it a “long term trend.”

At some point, something changed. Google started making reductions to how it used authorship rather than adding to it. Last fall, Cutts announced that Google would be reducing the amount of authorship results it showed by about 15%, saying that the move would improve quality.

In June, Google announced it was doing away with authors’ profile photos and circle counts in authorship results, indicating that doing so would lend to a “better mobile experience and a more consistent design across devices.”

But even then, results would still show a byline and contain a link to the author’s Google+ profile.

Last week came the death blow. Google’s John Mueller announced that the company had made “the difficult decision” to stop showing authorship in search results, saying that the information wasn’t as useful to users as it had hoped, and that it could “even distract from those results”. Emphasis added.

You know, because knowing more about a result – like who wrote it – is less useful.

According to Mueller, removing authorship “generally” doesn’t seem to reduce traffic to sites, though you have to wonder if that’s the case for more well-known authors who stand to be affected by this the most. Mueller wrote:

Going forward, we’re strongly committed to continuing and expanding our support of structured markup (such as schema.org). This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.

It’s also worth mentioning that Search users will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query — both in the main results, and on the right-hand side. Today’s authorship change doesn’t impact these social features.

As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan explains, just because authorship is now dead, that doesn’t mean “author rank” is.

Cutts said earlier this year that Google uses author rank in “some ways,” including in the In-Depth Articles section. Google’s Amit Singhal has also suggested that the signal could come into play more in the future in terms of regular organic search results.

Cutts said this late last year: “We are trying to figure out who are the authorities in the individual little topic areas and then how do we make sure those sites show up, for medical, or shopping or travel or any one of thousands of other topics. That is to be done algorithmically not by humans … So page rank is sort of this global importance. The New York times is important so if they link to you then you must also be important. But you can start to drill down in individual topic areas and say okay if Jeff Jarvis (Prof of journalism) links to me he is an expert in journalism and so therefore I might be a little bit more relevant in the journalistic field. We’re trying to measure those kinds of topics. Because you know you really want to listen to the experts in each area if you can.”

Sullivan also points to an excerpt from Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s 2013 book The New Digital Age, which says: “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.”

The point to all of this is that even though so-called “authorship” is dead, it still matters to Google who you are, and that could have a much bigger impact on your visibility in the search engine than authorship itself ever did.

But still, what a big waste of time, right? And how did Google go from thinking authorship information was so useful a year ago to finding it useless now?

What do you think? Should Google have killed authorship? Do you believe the reasoning the company gave? Let us know in the comments.

Image via Google+

September 2, 2014
Google Just Killed Authorship Entirely

Google announced that it is no longer using authorship markup or displaying author information in search results, saying that it just wasn’t as useful as expected.

Actually, it was Google’s John Mueller who announced the change on his personal Google+ page rather than on any official Google blog, which seems odd for something like this that Google pushed on users a great deal a couple years ago. Mueller writes:

I’ve been involved since we first started testing authorship markup and displaying it in search results. We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.

(If you’re curious — in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.)

He goes on to note that Google will continue to expand support of structured markup like schema.org, and use it to show rich snippets in search results. He also says the changes won’t affect users seeing Google+ posts from friends and pages in search results or publisher markup.

Asked in the comments if Google will still be using authorship data behind the scenes, and whether or not people should remove the code from their pages, Mueller said, “No, we’re no longer using it for authorship, we treat it like any other markup on your pages. Leaving it is fine, it won’t cause problems (and perhaps your users appreciate being able to find out more about you through your profile too).”

Asked if there is no longer any value to showing Google (via interlinking with the Google+ profile) what pieces of work have been published online, Mueller responded, “Well, links are links, but we’re not using them for authorship anymore.”

Some obviously feel like they’ve jumped through various hoops Google has thrown at them, only for it all to have been a waste of time. It’s still not exactly clear why taking it away makes search results more useful.

Here’s Mueller’s full post:

Image via Google+

August 29, 2014
Google Answers Questions About Authorship

Google posted to its Webmaster Central blog today to address seven questions the company is commonly hearing about authorship, or rel=”author”.

The post discusses what kinds of pages can be used with authorship, use of company mascots as authors, language issues, multiple authors for a single article, preventing Google from showing authorship, the difference between rel=author and rel=publisher, and use of authorship on property listings and product pages.

Google says it only uses authorship when a page contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or piece of content by an author – not a list of articles or an updating feed – or the page consists primarily of content written by the same author. It needs to have a clear byline on the page with the same name as the one used on the author’s Google profile.

“Authorship annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real person’s perspective or analysis on a topic,” writes Maile Ohye, developer programs tech lead for Google. “Since property listings and product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using authorship in these cases. However, an article about products that provides helpful commentary, such as, “Camera X vs. Camera Y: Faceoff in the Arizona Desert” could have authorship.”

Google only supports one author per article currently, but says it is experimenting with finding “the optimal outcome” when there are multiple authors. Google wants humans for authorship, so don’t use it for your mascot.

On rel=author vs. rel=publisher, Ohye says, “rel=publisher helps a business create a shared identity by linking the business’ website (often from the homepage) to the business’ Google+ Page. rel=author helps individuals (authors!) associate their individual articles from a URL or website to their Google+ profile. While rel=author and rel=publisher are both link relationships, they’re actually completely independent of one another.”

If you’re wondering if you should have URLs for content in different languages pointing to two separate Google profiles in different languages, the answer is no. Use one Google+ profile in your language of preference.

If you don’t want authorship to be displayed in Google results, simply prevent your Google profile from being discoverable in search results. If you don’t want to do that, you can just remove any profile or contributor links to the site or remove the markup so it’s not connected with your profile.

August 21, 2013
Authorship May Already Substantially Impact Google Rankings

It’s been pretty clear for quite a while that Google really likes its authorship signal, and aims to improve it, and make it matter more in search. True enough, the feature does have its benefits when it comes to associating content with certain people, and establishing trust while also improving visibility on crowded search results pages.

However, Google hasn’t exactly been rushing to tell people it’s going to help their ranking on the search page. It has not been officially established as a direct ranking signal. A new report from Search Mojo CEO Janet Driscoll Miller makes a pretty compelling argument that authorship has is already being used as a direct ranking signal, though she admits it’s only a theory. But really, it is a very convincing theory.

I would urge you to read her detailed account of the events that led her to this theory, but to make a long story short, a client (some health-related association) had been apparently hit by the Panda update. The client who had plenty of authoritative links lost its rankings while another site that had plagiarized its content (one of a handful) managed to rank. That offending site was using authorship, despite not being the true author of the content. When they got this site to remove the content, the rankings for the client were improved.

“Some other things to note about this problem include that the offending website is a locally-based business in Texas,” Miller writes. “As a searcher based in Virginia, you wouldn’t normally expect to see this local business high in SERPs based on geographic settings.”

“However, this site ranked very highly for very popular keyword terms, ranking alongside highly authoritative sites on the given keywords and subjects,” she adds. “The site had few, if any, inbound links. After doing some research using the Wayback Machine, it was also clear that these pages were likely added in the May 2013 timeframe, so they were relatively new pages.”

Again, you should really read her report for the full story, which makes the argument all the more convincing. She also makes a great point about the potential for abuse if Google is really giving this kind of weight to authorship. Anyone can use authorship and steal content. If that means they’re going to rank over the true authors, that’s obviously a major issue that Google needs to (and surely will) deal with.

Either way, this pretty much indicates that using authorship is a must. There’s no real reason that I’m aware of not to use it, but after this, I’m wondering if there are harmful consequences of not using it.

Note that this report doesn’t come from some random conspiracy theorist webmaster, but from a long-time respected voice in the search industry.

The possible Panda connection to authorship is quite interesting, considering that Google (which had previously indicated that it would no longer confirm Panda updates) recently confirmed a new Panda update, which it said included new, unspecified signals. Authority and trust have always been major indicators of quality to Google and are specifically discussed in Google’s post Panda content advice.

In June, Matt Cutts was talking about Google finding ways to improve authorship and looking for other ways to use it.

“I’m pretty excited about the ideas behind rel=’author’,” he said. “Basically, if you can move from an anonymous web to a web where you have some notion of identity and maybe even reputation of individual authors, then webspam, you kind of get a lot of benefits for free. It’s harder for the spammers to hide over here in some anonymous corner.”

I’m not so sure about that statement in light of Miller’s report.

Cutts continued, “Now, I continue to support anonymous speech and anonymity, but at the same time, if Danny Sullivan writes something on a forum or something like that I’d like to know about that, even if the forum itself doesn’t have that much PageRank or something along those lines,. It’s definitely the case that it was a lot of fun to see the initial launch of rel=’author’. I think we probably will take another look at what else do we need to do to turn the crank and iterate and improve how we handle rel=’author’. Are there other ways that we can use that signal?”

He concluded the video by saying, “I do expect us to continue exploring that because if we can move to a richer, more annotated web, where we rally know…the philosophy of Google has been moving away from keywords, ‘from strings towards things,’ so we’ve had this Knowledge Graph where we start to learn about the real world entities and the real world relationships between those entities. In the same way, if you know who the real world people are who are actually writing content, that could be really useful as well, and might be able to help you improve search quality. So it’s definitely something that I’m personally interested in, and I think several people in the Search Quality group continue to work on, and I think we’ll continue to look at it, as far as seeing how to use rel=’author’ in ways that can improve the search experience.”

Clearly this is going to be something for webmasters and SEOs to keep an eye on, and in light of Miler’s report, I would imagine that authorship is going to be more scrutinized than ever.

August 8, 2013
Google Will Continue To Improve How It Handles Authorship, Look For Other Ways To Use It

Over the past couple of years, it has become abundantly clear that authorship will continue to play an increasingly important role in how Google determines when and how to rank some types of content in search results. Nothing is changing there, and you can expect Google to continue to look for ways to improve how it uses this signal.

Google’s Matt Cutts put out a new Webmaster Help video today discussing this. Specifically, he responds to the user-submitted question:

Will Google be evaluating the use of rel=”author” moving forward as more sites use the feature on generic, non-article/news pages, such as the home page or an about page?

“My brief answer is yes,” begins Cutts. “I’m pretty excited about the ideas behind rel=’author’. Basically, if you can move from an anonymous web to a web where you have some notion of identity and maybe even reputation of individual authors, then webspam, you kind of get a lot of benefits for free. It’s harder for the spammers to hide over here in some anonymous corner.”

“Now, I continue to support anonymous speech and anonymity, but at the same time, if Danny Sullivan writes something on a forum or something like that I’d like to know about that, even if the forum itself doesn’t have that much PageRank or something along those lines,” he continues. “It’s definitely the case that it was a lot of fun to see the initial launch of rel=’author’. I think we probably will take another look at what else do we need to do to turn the crank and iterate and improve how we handle rel=’author’. Are there other ways that we can use that signal?”

Cutts concludes, “I do expect us to continue exploring that because if we can move to a richer, more annotated web, where we rally know…the philosophy of Google has been moving away from keywords, ‘from strings towards things,’ so we’ve had this Knowledge Graph where we start to learn about the real world entities and the real world relationships between those entities. In the same way, if you know who the real world people are who are actually writing content, that could be really useful as well, and might be able to help you improve search quality. So it’s definitely something that I’m personally interested in, and I think several people in the Search Quality group continue to work on, and I think we’ll continue to look at it, as far as seeing how to use rel=’author’ in ways that can improve the search experience.”

Cutts discussed authorship in a hangout about social search back in the fall. In that, he indicated that authorship could become a weightier signal in the future. In fact, he dubbed it a “long term trend”.

The moral of the story is: If you have started building reputation and credibility yet, you should probably do so. You’ll also want to implement authorship markup.

June 5, 2013
Google Authorship Can Help “Level The Playing Field” In Search Visibility

Last summer, Google announced that it would begin supporting authorship markup, or rel=”author”. It’s still in pilot mode, but Google has been making use of it in search results ever since, in increasing numbers, as more web content authors use it.

No matter how many places you produce content on the web, the idea is that you tie them all back to your Google profile, so Google understands that it’s all coming from you. Among the benefits to authors, is an extra visual link in Google search results – an author photo pointing to that Google profile, when your content appears in the results. It can lend to reputation and increased exposure of your personal brand. It even shows your Google+ circle count. Author info can appear both on Google web search and Google News:

It can help webmasters see how well certain authors are performing as well. In December, Google added author clicks and impressions to Webmaster Tools, so webmasters can see how often author content is showing up in Google search results.

“If you associate your content with your Google Profile either via e-mail verification or a simple link, you can visit Webmaster Tools to see how many impressions and clicks your content got on the Google search results page,” explained Google at the time.

Update: This feature appears to have suddenly gone missing. At this time, we’re unable to determine whether this is temporary or not. We’ve reached out to Google for more info, and will update accordingly.

Setting Up Authorship

There are actually 3 different ways to implement authorship markup on your content: original – three-link method (author’s Google profile, author pages and article page link to one another), the two-link method (Google Profile and Content) and the email method (when you have an email address on the site you’re writing for). Sagar Kamdar, Google’s authorship mastermind talked about each of these in an interesting interview with Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting. There’s an email verification tool you can use, by the way.

According to Kamdar, the email method might actually get you setup more quickly. “Sometimes authors don’t have the ability to add additional links from the bio portion of their article or they need to request their webmaster to make some tweaks to enable that,” he is quoted as saying. “The email method doesn’t require any modification to the website to get setup, so it is possible that you could get setup a little bit faster for that than the 2 link method. In addition, with email verification, it is far more dependent upon our heuristics and analysis to figure out if content is associated to your Google profile and that’s a science that we are constantly tuning.”

You can go to your Google Profile, go to “Edit Profile,” scroll down and click on “work,” click the drop down arrow next to “phone,” click on “email,” and put in your address where it says new contact info. Change the visibility of the section from “only you” to “everyone on the web,” click “save,” and click “done editing.”

Here are a couple videos of Google talking about getting authorship set up:

Authorship As A Ranking Signal

In that first one, Google’s Matt Cutts asks, “Will people get higher rankings? Is there a rankings boost for rel=’author’?”

Google’s Othar Hansson then replies, “It’s obviously early days, so we hope to use this information and any information as a ranking signal at Google. In this case, we want to get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking. We’re only experimenting with that now. Who knows where it will go?”

The video was released in August. Obviously a great deal of time has passed since then. We can’t say with 100% certainty that it’s already a ranking factor, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I certainly see a lot of authorship-enabled results in my daily search activity.

Kamdar actually addresses it in his interview with Enge. Enge brought up the idea that “this will feed into social signals and author authority in the long term.”

Kamdar responded, “Yes, you could eventually see that type of thing happening.”

Eventually.

Google’s most recent monthly list of algorithm changes included a couple of relevant items to this discussion. One was “better indexing of profile pages.”

“This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.”

This (if it was really this particular change) seemed to actually give Google profiles less weight in search results. Certain queries that at one point ranked Google profiles higher were showing more relevant profiles ahead of their Google counterparts (like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile over his Google+ profile).

Another change in March was listed as “UI refresh for News Universal.” Google described this: “We’ve refreshed the design of News Universal results by providing more results from the top cluster, unifying the UI treatment of clusters of different sizes, adding a larger font for the top article, adding larger images (from licensed sources), and adding author information.”

Author info was already appearing in Google News, but now, through Google’s Universal results, here is another opportunity for your authorship-enabled Google profile to show up.

The Doorway to Google+

There are obvious benefits to authors from enabling authorship for Google. There are, of course, benefits to Google as well. The main one would be increased emphasis on Google+. As Google CEO Larry Page explained during an earnings call last week, there are two parts of Google+: the “social destination” (what most people think of as Google+) and the “social spine,” which is the social layer over the rest of Google’s products – including search.

Google has already implemented Search Plus Your World this year, which includes increased integration of Google+ into search results. It relies on social connections Google+ users have made with others, to personalize search results based, in part, on those social connections.

Authorship further integrates Google+ into search results (granted, this was going on ahead of SPYW’s launch). Every time it shows a user a Google profile because of authorship, it is providing another doorway to Google+, the social destination.

If you go to my Google profile, for example, you’ll see my recent Google+ posts, public +1’s, etc. The Google Profile, which has been around much longer than Google+, still serves as the central part of a Google+ user’s account. This is another reason Google+ should simply be thought of as Google at large.

Your Google+ As Your Online Identity

It’s about online identity more than anything else. Kamdar acknowledges this in that interview as well.

“The main thing that we are trying to address is the faceless nature of the web,” he is quoted as saying. That alone should be a clear indicator just how much of a competitor Google is to Facebook.

It’s also for that reason that Google is really picky about how authors represent themselves online. At first, Google didn’t even allow pseudonyms on Google+.

“It was largely an issue of development priorities,” Google’s Vic Gundotra explained at last year’s Web 2.0 summit. “It’s complicated to get this right. It’s complicated on multiple dimensions. One of the complications it’s complicated on is atmosphere. If you’re a woman and you post a photo and Captain Crunch or Dog Fart comments on it, it changes the atmosphere of the product.”

After a while, Google began allowing for pseudonyms.

But that’s not the only area where Google has shown stinginess in author representation. Google has actually told people to change their profile pictures if they didn’t feel they were a good representation. We talked about this last year, when my colleague Josh Wolford was asked to change his Google profile picture. Wolford was using an image of himself made up as a Zombie from a Halloween party. This photo:

As a matter of fact, it was Kamdar himself, who emailed Wolford to say, “We noticed you’ve set things up correctly on your end. However, while we’re in this limited testing, we’re trying to make sure that we’ve got the best author pictures we can get–is there any way you could have a non-zombie picture for your profile?”

Kamdar also briefly addressed this issue in his interview with Enge. “The basic criteria is that you are setup correctly, you provide a high quality photo of yourself, and then based on our algorithm when your content shows up, we just try to make sure the photo would be relevant to the user. In terms of timeline, it just depends on the frequency of how often we crawl and index your content which is variable, based on sites. We just follow the natural progression of our crawling and indexing technology and it could be setup in days or it could take weeks.”

Other Authorship-Related Things To Consider

There were a few more noteworthy takeaways from Kamdar’s conversation with Enge.

One is that he (and presumably Google) sees authorship as a way for users to identify the authors they already like when they write about something they’re searching for. To me, this only adds to the “filter bubble”. Readers could be missing out on content from other great authors just because they’re going to the ones they’re familiar with.

Another is that you should use the Rich Snippets testing tool, which Kamdar suggest using for seeing if you have authorship implemented correctly.

Finally, it’s ok to link to sites on your Google Profile, which you contribute to, without having authorship set up on those sites. It won’t hurt you in any way, other than keeping your content from that site from appearing with your Google Profile in search results.

The most important takeaway from all of this, however, is that if you are concerned about your visibility in search results, and you’re creating content on the web, you should be implementing this. From the sound of it, Google is only going to use the info more in ranking going forward. Of course, it also suggests that you’d be wise to use Google+ more as a social tool. Remember, with authorship, Google is showing circle counts, and you’re not going to be in many circles without some level of engagement. Of course, even without the search visibility aspect, engaging in the community is likely to help you on its own.

The good thing, for many content creators, is that you don’t have to write for a major publication to use it. These days, thanks to blogs, social media and other user-generated content sites, anyone can be a content creator, and the more weight Google gives to authorship, the more authors on all levels will be able to compete for visibility.

April 16, 2012
Why Google Is Picky About Profile Pictures

Google is kind of anal about profile pictures. We already knew this, but it has been confirmed with a new post from MG Siegler on his personal blog.

He tells the story about how Google deleted his profile photo, which featured Siegler flipping off the camera. Google deleted it, he re-uploaded it, and they deleted it again. Since then, he has re-uploaded it with a Google+ logo over the finger, as pictured below:

Google+ profile” src=”http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/pictures/mg-siegler-finger.jpg” title=”MG Siegler Google+ Profile” class=”aligncenter” width=”616″ height=”332″ />

“My problem isn’t so much with the fact that I couldn’t have a profile picture of myself giving everyone the finger — which I can and do on Twitter and elsewhere — it’s that no one bothered to tell me or warn me before they just went into my account and deleted the picture,” writes Siegler. “What if this was the only place I had stored the picture?”

“Bigger picture: this seems like a ridiculous thing for Google to be policing,” he adds. “At first, they were all about ensuring that everyone was using their real name on Google+. After a shit storm about why that was stupid, they backed off. They should back off here as well because, honestly, who gives a shit? If my profile picture offends people, let them un-Circle me or whatever.”

Why Google gives a shit: just like Google+ itself, Google profiles have a lot to do with search – the one area where Google absolutely cannot fail.

Earlier this year, we were setting up Google’s authorship markup for our writers here at WebProNews. More background on what this is here. One of our writers, Josh Wolford, happened to have the following image as his Google Profile pic at the time:

He was a Zombie for Halloween, and he liked the picture (presumably, he still does), so he had it as his profile picture.

So, when we set up authorship for Google, Josh received a message from Google’s Sagar Kamdar shortly thereafter, requesting that he switch the picture. Google wanted more of just a regular headshot, from what I gather, at least for authors, because they appear in search results, as an indicator of trust. The thinking is, as I understand it, that if you get a bunch of weird and/or offensive pictures coming up in search results it reflects poorly on the quality of these search results, even if the content is just fine.

The concept is debatable, but this appears to be Google’s line of thinking. I’ve reached out to Kamdar for further comment, and will update accordingly.

Update: Josh dug up the message for me. Here’s what Kamdar said:

“As a quick thumbnail, I’m a PM on the Google Search team responsible for our authorship launch.”

“We noticed you’ve set things up correctly on your end. However, while we’re in this limited testing, we’re trying to make sure that we’ve got the best author pictures we can get–is there any way you could have a non-zombie picture for your profile?”

So, perhaps moving beyond the “limited testing phase” this won’t be as much of an issue, but after the Siegler’s story, I have to wonder.

Now, in Josh’s case, Google didn’t simply delete his picture, but he also wasn’t making a gesture that many people consider obscene, like flipping the camera off.

This may not be exactly the same thing as what happed in Siegler’s case. In fact, Siegler shares a comment he got from Google’s Alex Joseph, who said:

As the first point of interaction with a user’s profile, all profile photos on Google+ are reviewed to make sure they are in line with our User Content and Conduct Policy. Our policy page states, “Your Profile Picture cannot include mature or offensive content.” Your profile photo was taken down as a violation of this policy. If you have further questions about the policies on Google+ you can visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/content.html,or click the “Content Policy” link located in the footer of Google+ pages.

So while these cases may be slightly different, they both point to a larger point about the image Google wants its profiles to represent.

Siegler is an author. He writes content for the web (and often popular content at that). I don’t know for certain whether he has Google’s authorship markup set up or not, though Google may have deleted his picture either way.

On the web, everyone is an author, potentially. All you have to do is add the markup, connect it to your Google Profile, and you can be considered an author too, and try to boost your credibility with Google, which could help you in search.

For Google, search is still the company’s bread and butter, even while it offers so many other products. Google has been rigorously launching algorithm updates all year with the sole goal of improving the quality of search results. Authorship, as it relates to search, is another factor for improving quality, and establishing trust and authority.

But again, the censorship of Profile photos is a debatable practice when it comes to authority and trust. I don’t think I’m too far off in saying that MG Siegler has become one of the more authoritative voices in tech journalism, and just because he is holding up his middle finger in his profile pic, that doesn’t change. Isn’t your profile part of how you wish to represent yourself on the web? If this is the kind of image Siegler (or Wolford) wishes to present for himself, why isn’t he allowed to do so?

Well, it is Google’s web property, so they do get to make the rules. It wouldn’t be the first time people disagreed with one of Google’s policies.

December 28, 2011
Google Cans Author Search Operator in Google News In Favor of Authorship

You may have noticed by now that Google is placing a lot of emphasis on authorship these days. Just last week, they announced the addition of authorship clicks and impressions to Webmaster Tools.

Apparently Google is pushing authorship markup so hard they are eliminating other ways for users to find content by author. They have eliminated the “author:” search operator in Google News, which allowed users to find article specific to one author. Now, it’s all about authorship markup, like Google has been pushing in its regular web search results. In a post in the Google Help Forums (via Search Engine Roundtable), a Googler, Erik S., commented:

The author: search operator is no longer available. For author-specific Google News content, I would recommend use of the Authorship capabilities in Google News, introduced last month. Integration with Google+ circles means easier following and engagement between authors and readers.

Authorship markup is actually not only a way for authors to gain visibility in search, but a way for Google to gain visibility for its Google Profiles, which are essentially the center of the Google+ user experience. Google’s version of the Facebook Wall, if you will.

These are sprinkled all throughout search results now, and that includes on Google News.

Earlier this year, Google’s Othar Hansson said in a video, “It’s obviously early days, so we hope to use this information and any information as a ranking signal at Google. In this case, we want to get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking. We’re only experimenting with that now. Who knows where it will go?”

That was in early August.

If you’re not already implementing authorship markup, it might be a good time to start considering it. For more about it and how to use it, check out this set of articles.

December 19, 2011
Google Authorship Clicks And Impressions Added To Webmaster Tools

We know that who you are is more important in Google now. Google has been pushing authorship markup for months. This ties you, as an author of content, to your Google Profile, which is linked to from a picture of you that appears next to your content in Google search results.

Google has been clear about aiming to turn this into a ranking factor, if it isn’t already. It gives Google more information about the credibility of a piece of content. If it knows more about who wrote it, it can keep that in perspective. We don’t know how big a role this plays, exactly, but given the emphasis Google has been placing on the concept in recent months, you’d probably do well to put some emphasis of your own on it.

Google announced the launch of author stats in Webmaster Tools. These show how often content is showing up – by author – on Google search results pages, allowing you to track clicks and impressions.

“If you associate your content with your Google Profile either viae-mail verification or a simple link, you can visit Webmaster Tools to see how many impressions and clicks your content got on the Google search results page,” writes software engineer Javier Tordable on the Google Inside Search blog.

The image at the top is what Matt Cutts would see here.

@mattcutts
Matt CuttsI love Google’s new “author stats” feature: http://t.co/E5DO9MK8 Shows you helpful info without extra noise. 10 hours ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

To see your own, you can log into Webmaster Tools with the same name you use for your Google Profile, and go to “author stats” under “labs” on the left-hand side.

Keep in mind that being under the “labs” label means it is still in its experimental stage, so there is the possibility that there are bugs.

For more on setting up your authorship, read these articles.

December 15, 2011
Authorship in Google Results to Include Comments, Expanded Circles Features

Google continues to make changes to the authorship element it displays in search results. Yesterday, we reported on Google now letting you set it up by verifying your email address on your Google Profile, though this makes your email address public, and not all people will want to do this.

Here are a couple of videos from Google we looked at a while back, explaining how to implement authorship markup:

About a month ago, we looked at Google adding circle counts for some authors in search results. Today, they announced this and a couple more changes to go with it. Now, they’re showing circle count, “add to circles,” and comments.

“You should be able to easily engage with and hear more from authors you like, so we’re making that easy by allowing you to add authors to your circles right in search results (this feature is rolling out over the coming weeks),” says Google software engineer Wanda Hung. “Another way you can engage with authors is to comment directly to them on Google+. Now if an author shares an article on Google+ and they get comments on it, you’ll see a link on the search results page to view the comments in Google+.”

Google shows this example:

As we’ve said repeatedly, it’s clear that who you are is more important in Google’s eyes than ever. In August, Google’s Othar Hansson said, “It’s obviously early days, so we hope to use this information and any information as a ranking signal at Google. In this case, we want to get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking. We’re only experimenting with that now. Who knows where it will go?”

By the way, in terms of comments showing up, don’t forget that there is likely also a Google+-based comments system for sites on the way.

October 28, 2011
Google Authorship By Email

Google announced that you can now set up authorship for search results by verifying your email address with your Google profile.

This is an extension of the authorship markup launched earlier this year. What this does is tell Google that your content is associated with you. It shows a picture of you in the search results, and links to your Google Profile. It can help you stand out in search results.

Googles Sagar Kamdar shows how to set this up with your Google profile on the Inside Search blog. “For example, let’s say you write content on a page hosted at http://www.galaxytimes.com. To participate in the authorship program, put your name on your content and your e-mail address.” he says. “Then verify your email address sagark@galaxytimes.com on your Google+ profile.”

On your Google Profile, go to “Edit Profile,” scroll down and click on “work,” click the drop down arrow next to “phone,” click on “email,” and put in your address where it says new contact info. Change the visibility of the section from “only you” to “everyone on the web,” click “save,” and click “done editing.”

Tip: make sure you’re ok with people seeing your email address.

It will be interesting to see how much they add to the authorship element. Recently, they started including circle counts for some users.

October 27, 2011
Google Shows Circle Counts for People In Search Results

Lately, Google has been placing a lot of emphasis on the importance of who you are on the web. That’s why they want you to use your real name on Google+ (or more broadly, your Google Profile).

This thinking certainly applies to search. This year, Google introduced authorship markup, which helps Google associate various content from a person with that person in search results, and ultimately gets that person’s profile prominence in Google search results. If you ever see a little image of a person off to the side of a search result, which is clickable (leading to that person’s profile), this is likely what you’re seeing.

It’s good for authors to gain exposure, and it helps readers establish some level of trust by simply knowing where a result is coming from (regardless of whether or not they actually trust any specific author). In fact, Google is so concerned about this, it doesn’t even want authors to have profile pictures that are the least bit unprofessional. For example, I know a guy who was using a picture of himself in his Halloween costume for his profile picture, and a Googler actually contacted him and asked him to change it. There was nothing bad about the picture, they just wanted a regular picture of him for his profile pic, presumably so people wouldn’t see anything goofy in the search results, and hurt the perception of Google’s rankings, even if the content it showed up next to was perfectly legitimate.

Google recently posted a pair of videos explaining how to implement authorship markup, if you need a bit of guidance:

It would appear that Google considers how many people have you in Circle on Google+ to be some indication of who you are now.

The Next Web says an unnamed source confirmed that the next step of Authorship Markup is to show the number of Circles you’re in on the search results pages. You can already see it in action for some people.

This actually makes the whole Circle limit thing a little more interesting. If you can only have so many people in your Circles on Google+, you’re not going to want to add just anybody right? In an article this week, we called for Google to get rid of Circle limits because it limits our access to information through Google+, but is this the mindset Google has here?

The bigger names on the web are going to have more connections, so if they can’t put every one of them into a Circle, they’re only going to want to put their top connections in there. I don’t know if this is the way Google is looking at things, but it raises an interesting point, especially with the attention that Klout has been getting (and now its new competitor Kred).

While we don’t know that the number of Circles you are in is a search ranking signal, it seems very likely. Remember, when Google was talking about authorship markup, they said they want to “get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking.” It seems pretty logical that circle count could play a role.

If I’m wanting to get more Google search respect, I’m trying to get in more Circles.

September 30, 2011
Google Authorship Markup – An Easier Way
Google really wants people writing web content to start using authorship markup. Not only are they looking to use it as a ranking signal, but it also pushes the Google Profile, which is essentially the backbone of the Google+ user experience.

Granted, you don’t need to be a Google+ user (at least at this point) to have a Google Profile, and Profiles existed before Google+, but in Google+, the Profile is essentially the equivalent of the Facebook Wall, and authorship markup places them right in search results with nice little clickable graphics.

In a recent article, we looked at a video Google released discussing how to implement authorship markup on your site. They’ve now released another one offering a few quick steps to get it to work when you don’t necessarily control the CMS of the site you’re writing content for. This way, even guest authors can add it.

Google calls it, “a way to make it even easier to annotate your pages and show that there is authorship.”

Here are the basic steps:
“If I can’t control the attributes, I can still add a link to this special URL,” says Cutts, and it’s really as simple as that.
August 12, 2011
The Next Google Ranking Signal: Your Google Profile?

Long story short: if you’re looking to help your search engine rankings, you might need a Google Profile (the backbone of Google+).

Who you are as an individual is becoming more important in search ranking. Is this the right way to go for search? Share your thoughts.

As previously reported, Google has a new series of tutorial videos, and in a new one, Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson discuss “authorship markup”.

Google announced this back in June saying it is “experimenting ” with using the data to help people find content from authors in search results.

In the new video, Cutts asks, “Will people get higher rankings? Is there a rankings boost for rel=’author’?”

Hansson then replies, “It’s obviously early days, so we hope to use this information and any information as a ranking signal at Google. In this case, we want to get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking. We’re only experimenting with that now. Who knows where it will go?”

For the time being, what you get, he explains, is your photo showing up next to your results. The idea is to show photos next to results. That’s the goal with this project, he says.

“If people believe it’s a good idea, you know, using HTML5 hopefully might help Google and any other search engine figure out more about content on the web, and what’s trustworthy and what’s less trustworthy over time,” says Cutts.

Given the emphasis Google has been putting on trustworthy content (see Panda update), it’s easy to imagine this not only becoming a ranking signal, but a significant one.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. You have to have a Google Profile to use it. Kind of like Google+. Another interesting strategy to get people using Google’s new social network, no? And while still managing to keep things search-related. Well played, Google.

When the authorship markup is used, it leads to an author photo being displayed in Google search results when applicable. For example, if I write an article and that article appears in search results, it would come with a picture of me (from my Google Profile) next to it, and that would link to my Google profile. So, as an added bonus for Google, this will greatly increase the visibility of the Google Profile, and no doubt contribute to further growth of not only Google profiles, but Google+.

The Google Profile does actually keep the feature from being abused though. “To make sure that I can’t start writing nonsense and attributing it to Matt…you have to link back from your Google Profile to the site,” explains Hansson. “You need to control both endpoints basically.”

To use the markup on a single author site, you basically just need to:

1. On every post, add a link somewhere on the page pointing to your Google Profile (more visibility for Google Profiles)

2. On that link, add an attribute rel=”author”

3. The link can go in the footer or the header or wherever you can make it work.

4. You can wrap it around an image if you want.

If you have multiple authors on the site, like each author’s post to that author’s Google Profile. “That could be as simple as just at the bottom of each post, have the author actually insert a link themselves, with this attribute on it,” says Hansson. “Another thing that a lot of sites have, is…author bios.”

Link the bio to the author’s bio page, add rel=author on the links to the bio, and from the bio page add rel=”me” links to the Google Profile, and link the Google Profile back to that page.

“This obviously requires authors to make Profiles, and it requires webmasters to do the markup,” says Hansson.

Cutts says they’re trying to work with CMS manufacturers so that individual people don’t’ have to do all the work if they don’t want to.

For more detailed instructions on how to implement authorship markup, see Webmaster Tools help.

By the way, Google has been pretty weird with authors lately, though this is unrelated to the authorship markup discussed here, as far as I can tell.

Should authorship markup in this form be a significant ranking factor? Tell us what you think.

August 10, 2011
Who You Are Becoming More Important in Google

Google announced today that it is now supporting authorship markup, which it will use in search results. The company says it is experimenting with using this data to help people find content from authors in search results, and will continue to look at ways it could help the search engine highlight authors and rank search results.

This seems to indicate that Google will be placing even more emphasis on authority and/or personal connections with content. We have to wonder how this will affect content farms down the line.

In the Webmaster Central Help Center, Google says, “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.”

“We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages,” explains software engineer Othar Hansson on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog. “For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.”

“The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web,” continues Hansson. “If you’re already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, we’ll interpret that authorship information as well.”

Schema.org was revealed last week – an initiative on which Google, BIng, and Yahoo all teamed up together to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Schema.org provides tips and tools for helping sites appear in search results.

How to Implement it

To implement the authorship markup, Google says:

To identify the author of an article or page, include a link to an author page on your domain and add rel=”author” to that link, like this:

Written by <a rel=”author” href=”../authors/mattcutts”>Matt Cutts</a>.

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 http://example.com/content/webmaster_tips could have a link to the author page at http://example.com/authors/mattcutts. Google uses a variety of algorithms to determine whether two URLs are part of the same site. For example, http://example.com/content, http://www.example.com/content, and http://news.example.com can all be considered as part of the same site, even though the hostnames are not identical.

You can also link multiple profiles, as author pages can link to other web pages about the same author. You can tell Google that all of these profiles represent the same person by using a rel=”me” link to establish a link between the profile pages. More on this in the help center.

Google’s rich snippets testing tool will also let you check your markup and make sure Google can extract the proper data.

Google has already been working with a few publishers on the authorship markup, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNET, Entertainment Weekly, and The New Yorker. They’ve also added it themselves to everything hosted by YouTube and Blogger, so both of these platforms will automatically include the markup when you publish content.

June 7, 2011