Jay LeonardGoogle authorship is a Google+ program that allows an author to put his or her profile picture and name next to the article that he or she writes online. The article site or blog that he/she posts the article on must be optimized for the Google+ program. A person who has signed up for the program cannot simply insert his/her profile picture next to the article unless it is optimized for Google+ authorship, or unless the writer owns the domain and is able to make the appropriate changes. The Google+ user profile will note any articles that he/she has written, and the Google+ profile picture will appear besides the actual article, as will the profile name and links to the user’s profile and other articles that he/she has written online.
A good reputation may mean better SEO
It is possible for anybody to sign up for the Google+ authorship program. It is not very restrictive, and having a Google+ profile is half of the battle. However, creating an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly authorship is a little more difficult. If you want your profile to be search engine friendly, you need to create content that Google feels is high quality and useful. This needs to be backed by the things that Google feels shows your content to be useful such as people mentioning it on social media, people linking to it, etc. It results in increase in CTR in Google.
Once you have written quite a few articles under the authorship program (where your online article is linked to your Google+ profile), you will notice that your articles become more search engine friendly. People who have lots of well written articles will often see their content rise higher and faster through the Google search engine results page. Their content suddenly becomes more search engine friendly as their perceived reputation grows.
This means that an article written by a writer with a high reputation is going to help the page he/she places his/her article onto, rise up through the Google search engine results page; even if the website it is on is not ranked very highly.
The Google+ profile allows people to see other written
One of the best and most redeeming (non search engine manipulating) features of the Google+ authorship program is that you are able to see the other articles written by one author. Let’s say that you have read a nice article about dating by one writer and you would like to see is he/she has written any other similar articles on other websites. You are able to click the link underneath (or besides) the profile picture and gain access to all the other articles that the writer has written within the authorship program.
This is good for the reader and good for people who have articles or guest posts written by people within the authorship program. It means that if you accept a guest post from a writer with his/her Google+ authorship linked to it, then there is a chance that traffic will come from other websites to visit his/her article on your domain. If you are lucky then that user may stick around on your website/blog, and may even click some of your affiliate adverts. It is a nice way of getting traffic through the writer instead of through search engines or backlinks.
It offers a little more reassurance against content mill
Content mills were websites that were designed to host poor quality content for the sake of installing a link. Google have gone a long way in making sure that these poor quality websites no longer affect their search engine results. The Google+ authorship program was designed to enable people to create content that was high quality and then receive some sort of publicity benefit from it. If people create poor quality content within the program (such as that seen on content mills) then they receive very little benefit from the Google+ program.
It punishes the people who spin content
Again, if you produce poor quality content with keyword stuffing and without doing keyword research, then there is little point in tying it with your Google+ profile because you will lose popularity and credulity because of it. Google are aware that content may be spun and pass plagiarism checks, but their means for separating spun content from original content is slow. People who spin content and tie it with their Google+ profile will be adequately penalized quite quickly.
Google are going to tie more people to their social media
Google are doing more and more to tie SEO with social media, and they keep making moves to ensure that people use their social media first. Google+ and the authorship program are part of that, as is their absorption of YouTube. So, if you want to set yourself up for a more long-term SEO campaign, it is good to “get into bed” with Google as soon as possible.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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My blog is not showing my author profile in Google search. I have already done all steps. Can you help me Raman.
HI Gagan
You can do two things
1) Verify domain email for example [email protected]
2) Place your Google+ profile link on every page and add rel=’author’ tag.
Hope it will help you