Welcome back Rankers. I’m doing a Webinar next Tuesday August 23rd at 12.30pm Aust Eastern Standard Time if you’re in the US I thinks that’s Pacific Time 7.30 at night on August the 22nd. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m sure someone will. It’s going to be about SEO and Social Media and how they inter-relate. Today I wanted to touch on one particular aspect of that and that is Google Authorship and some of the network sharing that we’re seeing coming up in the search engine result pages now. A lot of you will be familiar with these sorts of results when you do a search for anything in Google. Here’s a search I’ve done for the word search and the #1 result is Bing and Matt Cutts of Google has shared that on Google Buzz. Now, I don’t use Google Buzz but as Google tells me here I’m connected to Matt Cutts on Google+, that’s one thing. Then you may have also seen things like, I’ll do an undercover search (Undercover is a famous Australian Music site) and I can see here the only bit of network information I’m getting is that Robert Scoble shared this on Twitter. How does Google know that I’m using Twitter? Or how does Google know that I’m connected to Robert Scoble via Twitter, it’s not that he follows me, I follow him. If we have a look at Google Profile, I’ve got my Twitter account set up for my Google Profile and that’s how Google knows that Robert Scoble shared that via Twitter. However with the recent breakdown in Google actually with real time search using Twitter and all these sorts of things and actually taking a feed from Twitter it looks like they’re starting to fade that out or actually give preference to Google+ shares or what we call +1. So, in the social shares, what we’re talking about is Twitter which I think is going to get fazed out, it looks like it is already and you’re not going to see that anymore in the search results. The +1 and remember you don’t have to have a Google+ account to use +1 it’s available as long as you’re logged in to Google in your gmail account, you can +1 something, a search result. The +1 button is available on site, it’s a little bit like the Facebook Like. I still believe that Facebook shares and likes are actually counting to your ranking in the search results but remember that with various types of access and publishing whether something’s public or private, that’s less accurate to who has actually shared something and liked something on Facebook. Yes, Google has actually indexed about 2 billion pages on Facebook but it’s only the public stuff not the private stuff. So the +1 allows people to say I like the search result even an ad. Now, over the weekend, we’re seeing that Google is actually saying people on Google+ are sharing that result. If I go to Googe+-mashable I can see these 3 people here have shared this via Google+. There’s Mr Mashable – Pete Cashmore and Ben Parr – journalist on Mashable.
So, what is this Google Authorship all about? There was a video released last week by Matt Cutts and Uther Hanson of Google talking about Google Authorship. Basically they’re saying it’s about attribution. I think it might be about a little bit more than that, I think it might be eventually, something that will take over page rank, replace page rank, be more important than page rank. Essentially a signal that will be used as a tie breaker like page rank used to be used as a tie breaker and I’ll explain that in a second. First of all attribution is about if an author posts an article somewhere regardless of the site it sits on, what Google is saying that you should link back to a bio page on that site with this code rel=”author” and then that bio page should actually point to your Google profile. Then that Google profile page should point back to the bio page with the code rel=”me” and that gives double confirmation that yes you’re the owner of that profile and you confirm that that bio page is about you and that the bio page is saying it’s about this guy. That way someone with a Google profile just can’t claim someone else’s work and someone on a particular site can’t say “Hey this was written by this really popular author”. That in turn will show up like this Robert Scoble’s one when you do a search. If I type Robert Scoble into Google you will see that this article here, this site here or this page here is by Robert Scoble. This is what they’re calling Authorship Markup so when an author who has authorship markup implemented on the articles that they write they will show up in the Google search results with their little photo and a link to their Google profile. Both of these things are important like this share thing here that we’re seeing and authorship here. The shares will appear when anyone’s logged into Google. This is something as a business that you don’t have a lot of control over, who shares your content. All you can do is create great content and hope that people are going to share it. Authorship you do have control of and this will appear to everyone regardless of whether you are logged into a Google account or not. So it’s independent of someone’s network, it’s purely about an individual who wrote that article.
Whilst the primary reason for Authorship, Google is saying, is attribution, both of these things are about click through rates. Google’s always trying to improve it’s product and they’re trying to increase the click through rates. In fact in Google webmaster tools these days we actually have a whole section now of +1 metrics to show you how it’s increasing click through rates and the effect on the search results. And yes, these shares and +1 and things will probably at some level be a signal to get a page up in the rankings. But why I think authorship long term is going to be more important is that if someone’s out there sharing content, if people are out there sharing content of a particular page, the author of that content is also going to get some kudos as well as the page itself, the URL itself. So, if a particular author’s content is always getting placed with +1 and it’s always getting shared on Google, that’s got to say something about that authors content. So the next time that author publishes it’s already going to carry a fair bit of weight regardless of where they publish. Of course if they publish in a more reputable publication, even better. In fact, I think a lot of publications, although they seek out bloggers, popular bloggers and authors already for their following, another part in the future is going to be about if you’re using this code down here and you’re using a reputable author. It’s going to give that page much more authority rather than just the followers who might backlink to it. So, it’s really important for a business these days if you’re creating content, and you should be, to have this authorship set-up for the long term and start getting used to that idea. It hasn’t been rolled out fully yet, I haven’t seen any in the .com.au space but certainly some of the major digiteratie like scobleizer and Pete Cashmore and the others you will already see a lot of their content start to appear with their photograph next to it to say this article is by this particular person. But just remember everyone sees the authorship results and who did it to increase click through rate and only people that are logged in will see this content from their network. It looks like certainly in my own streams, that Google+ and the +1’s are far more dominant than the twitter shares. I’ve got about 8,000 followers on twitter and I follow about 7,500 and on Google+ I’ve only got a couple of hundred but I’m seeing the results for Google+ come up a lot more than twitter. I think it’s also the transient nature of twitter that the Google bot maybe isn’t going back longer term and indexing things older than 30 days.
That’s it for todays show. Don’t forget webinar with Smartcompany.com.au next week, just head across to smartcompany and you will find that just google SEO Social Media and smartcompany and you will find that. We’ll see you next week if not Tuesday, we’ll catch up next Wednesday. Thank’s very much/ Bye.
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