It’s always a mad scramble to keep up with Google. Updates to its algorithm send thousands in the blogosphere into a frenzy. Remember the panda update? One day, your sites all ranked, nice and steady. The next, they’d all just disappeared and fallen off the face of the earth. Most SEO specialists lived through the horror of that time. And most of them live in fear of that ever happening again.
This is why every tiny, teeny thing Google does is news. Every new update is a cause for major concern—since it could turn a site’s rankings upside down, could lead a site to get top spot in the SERPs or sink it so low it crashes and burns.
The newest on Google—Google Authorship—is the same. The direction in which Google wants online marketing to take is obvious: online content has to exhibit more engagement, has to be more personal, and more unique. Linking one’s Google+ Plus account with Google authorship allows Google to verify the person behind a certain copy or site. This way, copies or sites whose authors are on Google authorship and who’ve linked those accounts to their Google+ are expected to be in the lead.
Why is that? Some say Google will inevitably rank pages—those with Google+ and Google authorship—higher than all the rest. That’s when the fun stuff should begin. Google Authorship might possibly serve as a handy stamp of approval from Google. It sort of works the same way as when your kindergarten used to give out stickers in class when you were good. And the best ones in the class got the most stickers.
In any case, Google’s point is simple: more original, non-spammy content. Content that’s different, fresh, and relevant. When Google gets that, it rewards you by putting your photo in the ‘snippet’ portion on the SERPs. That’s the text you see whenever you enter a keyword in the query box and a list of results come on. They think the photo will add credibility to the site and improve traffic.
However, those who aren’t really into Google+, those who feel like they have better things to do in life than join Google+ or spend more than a few afternoons on it every week or two, could find themselves at the bottom of the rung—even if they do offer excellent, relevant content.
Meaning, Google Authorship isn’t at all comprehensive or reliable, when it comes to measuring a site’s value. And it hasn’t even reached that stage where everyone measures your site by how many articles you have linked to Google authorship. Not right now, anyway. Not yet.
But in the future, it’s hard to tell if Google authorship will truly evolve into something like the Google AuthorRank, one that works like the page rank or domain authority, where Google can assign a ranking and that ranking would reflect the relevance or usefulness of a site—or lack thereof. The only safe thing to say is, if it does do that, then it’s sure to turn things upside down again. And send the folks in the online marketing blogosphere into another round of mad scrambling about just to keep up.
And the cycle continues.