There’s an interesting development brewing in the world of SEO. Of course by this point you’ve heard about Authorship (that’s with a capital A thank you very much) and exactly what it means to Google, but it turns out it is going to go deeper than just slapping your name onto posts. Authorship is going to tie in with PageRank and overall site authority to create a very deliberate and exacting picture of who knows what on the web. Let’s take a look at how this is going to be implemented and what it means for your digital marketing strategy moving forwards.
According to the illustrious Matt Cutts, Google is currently working on the way that authoritative Authors can talk to other Authoritative authors and pass maximum PageRank to other sites. Basically, if someone that Google has decided is an expert on a topic (like Rand Fishkin on SEO) links to another Author’s work within the same realm (SEO or digital marketing) that link will be worth a lot more than other links from pages with similar PageRank but from different spheres of industry.
Here’s how Matt Cutts described it:
We have been working on a lot of different stuff. We are actually now doing work on how to promote good guys. So if you are an authority in a space, if you search for podcasts, you want to return something like Twit.tv. So 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.