Just when you thought you could feel relief that you don’t have to worry about Google Author stuff anymore there’s more info to learn. This might be a small detail in SEO, but we’re here to inform you of all details big and small. Google Authorship is gone as mentioned in my previous post – Google Authorship is Now Dead!, but the use of Author Rank to improve search results will continue.
Google Authorship used to allow you to place code on your site so that when Google displayed that page in a search result your Google+ profile picture and details about you would pop up with the result making it more personal.
Google Author Rank however is simply Google identifying who authored a piece of content, and giving it a SEO boost if that person is well respected. This really only effects a small percentage of searches, but if you’re interested on how you can take advantage of it then think “byline”. Google just got rid of it’s formal way of collecting this information, and thus will likely go back to it’s informal way of collecting this information via bylines.
Overall, Google Author Rank is a very small piece of SEO with a myriad of other factors being far more important. However it never hurts to add in an author’s byline to gain a boost if there is one to be gained anyways!
Written By: Mike Knorr – Director of Sales and Marketing