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Steven: Okay, so for those of you who got up early hoping to learn the secrets of AuthorRank,
this great mystical topic that only a few can take advantage of, I have some bad news.
There is no such thing as AuthorRank. AuthorRank does not exist, okay? No matter what you have
read or maybe heard someone else speak or write about on their blog, no AuthorRank.
AuthorRank is a concept, it's a future concept. It is a hypothetical ranking factor. It's
not something that is currently in use or in effect right now, but it is something that
a lot of marketers and a lot of SEOs, myself included, believe will some day come into
effect. So one of the things that I want to do today
is help you prepare for AuthorRank. That's all you can do at this point. You can only
prepare, you cannot build your AuthorRank or establish AuthorRank or anything like that.
So if you've ever read anything like that, that's all BS basically.
So AuthorRank, being sort of a hot topic these days, is often confused with another term,
and that is Google Authorship. Google Authorship is something that exists today. It is something
that you can establish and something that you can take advantage of the benefits today
as soon as you leave here after you do a few things that I'm going to go over.
So understanding the difference between AuthorRank and Google Authorship and the differences
in what you can do there is what we're going to talk about today. And you'll see that Google+,
being the third term in the title of the presentation, is very ingrained in both of these things,
so we're going to talk a little bit about Google+ as well. Since this is a social media
group, that's probably a good thing. So, let's talk about AuthorRank first. The
best way to really understand AuthorRank and what AuthorRank could be and probably will
be, you really have to understand what SEO looks like right now, what the landscape of
SEO is. If you're trying to rank a page or a blog post, and this is probably something
that everyone in this room has tried to do at least once, there are basically four things
that you need to worry about, four basic categories of SEO. And this is a bit of a generalization,
so if there are any SEOs in the room, I hope you'll forgive that. But any report that comes
out from a SEOmoz or a Searchmetrics or any other major SEO company, these are the four
things that they track. So you have links, social, on-page technical, and on-page content.
If you want to rank a page or a blog post, you need to successfully complete these four
things. So, links. You need to build links to your
website. You want authoritative websites with high page ranks pointing to your site using
a keyword that you're trying to rank for, right? Companies spend hundreds of thousands
of dollars on SEO companies to build links for them, so you need links.
Social media, I probably don't need to explain social media to this group. You all know how
important social media is. You want people sharing your content on Twitter and talking
about you on Facebook and liking you and sharing your stuff. So you need to do that to be successful
in SEO. On-page technical is the third thing. Some
people call this architecture, right? This is the back end of your website. You have
an optimized site that has a clean architecture, you know, nice URL structure. You've hired
an SEO company to take care of all those technical things, all your metadata is in place, all
of that nerdy back end stuff. And then finally, on-page content, so the
actual content of your website, the written words on the page, things like keyword density
and h1 tags and things like that. But maybe more importantly is how good your content
is, right? We hear marketers and SEOs all the time saying, well, if you want to be successful
in SEO, make good content. We hear that all the time. Just make good content and you'll
be fine. Make content that people would pay you for or that solves problems and all these
other sort of platitudes we hear all the time. Now, the thing about this fourth one, your
on-page content, is it's a little different from the first three, right? The first three
are very quantifiable. They fit into Google's algorithm really well because they're numeric
and they can be very easily measured. You either have links or you don't have links,
and the links you have are either good or bad or somewhere in between. Right? You either
have people on social media talking about you or not. They are either saying good things
or bad. You either have it or you don't. And then on-page technical, your website is optimized
or it's not. You hire a company to do it and basically the job is done.
But on-page content is a little different. It doesn't fit into Google's algorithm very
well because it's sort of subjective. Google doesn't really have a great mechanism for
saying this blog post is way more useful than this one written about the same topic. So
this is a bit of a problem for Google. When you think about their algorithm, it's sort
of incomplete. How does Google know if content is truly good or truly useful, and maybe the
better question is how does Google know whether this content is written by someone who knows
what they're talking about? Is this person truly an expert on the topic that the blog
post or the web page has to do with? So that problem, this is the central issue
of AuthorRank, and it's actually a problem that Google has been thinking about since
at least 2005, so years before really content marketing took off and has been widely adopted
by marketers. So that is why Google put a team together
as early as 2005 and they created something called Agent Rank, and they put a patent together.
Now, I know it's 8:00 a.m., sorry to have to read some patent language to you, but whatever.
So this is what the patent says, and it's pretty interesting language. It begins by
saying that Agent Rank is the identity of individual agents responsible for content
can be used to influence search ratings. So basically what that is saying is Google not
only is going to look at the content when deciding to rank it, but they're also going
to take into account who the author of that content is. That's something that is not in
effect right now, but it's something that they're driving towards.
So the patent goes on to say, assuming that a given agent has a high reputational score
-- I hope you guys had some coffee, sorry -- representing an established reputation
for authoring valuable content, then additional content authored and signed by that agent
or author will be promoted relative to unsigned content or content from less reputable agents
or authors. So they're saying that content that is transparent
and non-anonymous will rank higher than content that is anonymous, which is pretty cool, actually.
So that's some kind of heavy language. One of the engineers on the team sums it up this
way, he says, we know that great content comes from great authors, and we're looking at ways
that we can highlight those authors in the search results.
So Google really cares about rewarding authors for being experts, for being prolific content
creators, and they want to rank those folks, they want to reward those folks for that good
work, which is a step in the right direction. So the engineer, and the language in the patent,
you know, what does an ideal author look like to Google when they're thinking about Agent
Rank? Well, some words pop out at me in that patent language. A high reputational score.
I perceive that as maybe someone who has a lot of followers, someone who has a lot of
readers or subscribers to their blog, someone with an established reputation, so they are
transparent about their identity. They have told Google who they are and they don't remain
anonymous. And then they're producing valuable content, so they're producing content regularly
that is perceived as helpful because it's getting a lot of traffic and shares. So that's
kind of the ideal author, and that's probably what all marketers, all content marketers,
would want to strive for anyway, you know, aside from this whole AuthorRank discussion.
So to sum up Agent Rank, which is the same thing as AuthorRank basically, AuthorRank
is what marketers call Agent Rank. For whatever reason, they came up with a new term, which
is a little weird. But basically, we're saying expert content written by non-anonymous authors
will rank higher than content that remains anonymous. That is AuthorRank, that's Agent
Rank, that's what we're here to talk about today.
So that's really great. That's exciting to me, especially someone who creates a lot of
content, and hopefully that makes you feel a little bit better about what Google is trying
to do. So it's not real, it's not in effect yet,
and there are a lot of things we don't know about how this is going to manifest. We don't
know how significant of a ranking factor it will be. Will this really jump a person up
several pages, or will it maybe only bump them up a few spots on one page? We don't
know. We don't know how strong of a ranking factor it will be. We don't know how the grading
system will sort of manifest. Will an author actually get a grade from one to ten, like
page rank? Will they get a grade from zero to a hundred, like domain authority? You know,
is it like a Klout score kind of? We don't know. We don't know how that's going to work.
And maybe most importantly is we don't know if this will ever go live. Google will not
tell us when it's going to go live, and when it is live, and it may never go live, by the
way. I mean, they may say today or tomorrow, we're not going to do this, sorry about you.
I don't think they will, and I'm going to lay out the case for why I don't think they
will, but we just don't know. So, that's AuthorRank. But Google wants this. They have said through
speeches and interviews and sending signals out in some of their blog posts and just all
the things they've done to sort of make this go into effect, it's pretty clear to me that
this is going to happen and Google wants it. This is Eric Schmidt, he's the Executive Chairman
at Google. He said something really interesting about this. He says that within search results,
information tied to verified online profiles will rank higher than content without such
verification. So he's saying this is going to happen, guys, and that's going to result
in most users naturally clicking on the top verified results. So Eric, the Chairman, he
cares about those top results being the best results for someone. And the last thing he
says, which is really the kicker in my mind, is that the true cost of remaining anonymous
might be irrelevance. That's pretty powerful, right?
Think about all the searches you've ever done on Google. One of my favorite examples of
what he's talking about is I work on fundraising software, and if you do a search for 'what's
the best fundraising software', if you type that into Google, you don't get a blog post
written by an expert on fundraising software who is making an impartial decision on what's
the best and why. You get eight different fundraising software companies all saying
we're the best and this is why, which is okay for someone maybe who's doing research. You
know, you can read all those things, they're well written. But when you look at those pages,
there's an 'about us' page or maybe there's a 'services' page, and it's not clear who
wrote that, you know? It's definitely someone at that company, but it's not who wrote that.
So Schmidt here would rather that the first result is someone who is an expert who is
giving an impartial suggestion on what the best fundraising software is.
So Google here is really trying to improve user experience for people who are using their
search engine, which is good. So we've talked a lot about being anonymous
and being non-anonymous and identity, well, how do you identify yourself to Google as
a content creator? There is a mechanism for that that exists, and that's Google Authorship.
Google Authorship exists today, it is something that everyone in this room, if you blog or
if you write for your website, you can establish this as soon as you get back to your office
today, and I would recommend that you do so, because it's awesome.
Basically what you do is you tell Google that you write for a given blog, and you do that
on your Google+ page. So you go into your Google+ profile, and there's a little section
here called 'the contributor to' section, and here you can list all the blogs that you
write for and you can even tell if you're a current or a past contributor. So that's
one half of identifying yourself to Google. Once you have done that, you have to send
a signal back from the blog or website that you write for to your Google+ profile so you're
making a connection between your blog and your Google+ profile, and you do that through
what's called the 'Rel=Author' tag. That's just a URL string that sits on the back end
of your site that points to your Google+ profile. Once you make that connection, Google knows
that you are the verified author of this content and you have Google Authorship, and you're
done. Now, the front end, the Google+ part, that's
really easy because all of you have access to your Google+ profiles, I hope. The second
half is a little bit harder depending on what CMS or website management program you have.
There are a lot of different ways to make that second half of the connection. If you're
on WordPress, it's very easy. There's a plugin called the Yoast SEO plugin that just adds
a field to your user profile where you put in your Google+ URL, and that makes the connection.
Compendium, they do a really great job of this. They get all of this stuff that I'm
talking about and make it easier for their folks. If you're on Tumblr or maybe Blogspot
or Blogger, whatever they call it, or maybe something else that doesn't have a CMS that
runs plugins, somewhere on the blog post or on the page, you need to send a signal to
your Google+ profile. So here, they do this in the sidebar. You
can also do this in your author bio, maybe below your blog post. You just have to hyperlink
your name to your Google+ profile and that completes the connection.
Now, I've listed a website here that has some really nice instructions. I'm not going to
dive deep into the instructions because it would take up the rest of the morning and
more, but it's not too difficult depending on what you use. So definitely go ahead and
do that. So once you've made the connection, you can
test whether you have Authorship set up. You can mosey on over to the structured data testing
tool and all you have to do is paste in a URL of a blog post and it'll tell you if Authorship
is working or not. If Authorship is working, you get a lot of benefits, a lot of cool things
happen for you that can drive traffic, drive more shares of your content, and just increase
the overall visibility. Google Authorship is believed to be a prerequisite
for establishing AuthorRank, because if you look back at that patent language that says
the identity of individual agents, well, Google Authorship establishes that identity piece,
right? So now you've got half of the equation. And then AuthorRank, sometime in the future
they're going to use that identity to influence search ratings.
So once you have Google Authorship established, you're pretty much future proofed at a minimum
for AuthorRank, so you'll be in good shape. So please do that today. There are lots of
benefits, lots of really awesome things for people who create content who have Authorship.
The first and foremost is the appearance of author rich snippets. Now, rich snippets is
what you see when maybe you share a link on Facebook, you know, there's that thumbnail
in the meta description, that's a rich snippet. An author rich snippet appears actually right
there in the search results, so you get a picture of the author, and they just pull
that right from your Google+ profile. There's also a link to other posts that person has
written for which Authorship has been established, and then there's also a link to that person's
Google+ profile. So you get those cool links, but you also get a little bit more visibility
in the search engine results page. If you compare that to some of the other results
who don't have a picture or some kind of rich snippets, you know, that picture really pops
out, and some people have been saying, well, my traffic increases because people's eyes
are kind of drawn to that. So that's a great thing to get right away.
If you're kind of ho-hum on that, well, consider that any time you look at a web page, they
place those snippets, that picture of you, right in the area where people are more prone
to look. So if you're the only result on the page with a picture, people are going to see
that, and you might get more clicks than would maybe people who are ranked above you. So
there's the sort of weird paradigm shift that maybe having the first result isn't as important
as having those rich snippets, because they pop out at the user, which is great.
There's a really cool article here, I recommend you guys read this, this is a guy who did
a study on how setting all of this up impacted his click-through rates. He was able to see
a pretty drastic increase from doing this. So your picture matters. Choose that picture
wisely. This is an SEO name, Cyrus Shepard, he writes a lot for SEOmoz, he did a study
where he A/B tested different variations of his face to see which one would get the most
clicks. He landed on one of these, I think he chose one of these yellow ones, and he
saw that his traffic increased 35% based on choosing the best picture of himself. So don't
choose a weird picture of yourself that maybe you're at a party or it's not a great picture.
Pick a good picture, for sure. And you can read that study there on that link at your
leisure. Now, you run your test, you think you have
Authorship set up, everything's feeling good, but that does not mean that your picture is
going to show up in the search engine results. Even if you get a positive test result, not
all users are going to see that. So this is a little bit of a sticking point. A lot of
things can affect how fast your face appears in those search results. A lot of things depend
on this. These things are my opinion, this isn't something
that Google has said. These are the things, you know, people are going to have to spend
a lot of time studying this before there's any definitive proof, but it's my belief that
how you set up Authorship matters, whether you have a nice author page, or maybe you're
just putting a link to your blog post in your Google+ profile. How often your website gets
crawled, so if you have Authorship set up and you post a new blog post this morning,
it may take time for Google to index and crawl that page before your picture is going to
show up in the search engine results. How often you publish can also make a difference.
If you only write a blog post once a month, you may not see those snippets appear as fast
as someone who maybe publishes once a day. Your Google+ profile matters, how many followers
you have, how often you use Google+ can also factor into it. And then people's individual
search settings. If you use Google and Chrome, you can turn off the social settings, you
can set geographic locations, there's a lot of different things you can do that can impact
what those search engine results look like. But if you get a positive test in that testing
tool, you can feel good about that. Don't worry about it too much. Eventually those
snippets will appear for you. Now, what's really cool is you don't have
to do this for just web pages or blog posts, you can do this for files, you can do this
for Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints, Excel files. So if you're doing any kind of hardcore
content marketing and you get those files ranked on a Google search result, you can
get snippets to appear there as well, which is pretty cool. All you have to do is somewhere
in that document have a link to your Google+ profile that is hyperlinked to your name.
So that's pretty nice, I think, that you can do that for files.
So, aside from the rich snippets, you get access to analytics that you normally wouldn't
have access to, and those are Authorship stats. Authorship stats reside in your Google Webmaster
Tools account, so for any blog, any website that you have Authorship set up for, you can
see the click-through rate on that blog post and you can see how often they appear in search
results, so appearance numbers. And you get that for every single blog post that you've
ever written that you have Authorship established for across all websites that you write for.
So people who say that their CTR increases after putting in Authorship, they don't know
what their CTR was before Authorship, right? You don't get it until you establish it, so
that's kind of BS, too. I don't like to rely on a lot of those studies, but you can see
trends, right? You can see if something is changing, if it's going up or down. You can
certainly test your photo once you have it established and seeing if a photo makes it
go up or down. And one of my favorite uses of this is this
tells me what blogs I should write for. I'm not going to write for a blog that isn't getting
a lot of impressions or clicks. Consistently in my 12 Stars Media posts, they're always
in the top results, so I'm going to keep writing there. I probably won't write for a blog that
maybe is at the bottom of impressions and clicks. So really awesome analytics that you
get there. Now, there are some people who should not
set up Authorship. Specifically, e-commerce Authorship is bad, because when you're an
e-commerce company, you're probably selling a product and if you get that product ranked
on Google, you get a different kind of rich snippet. You get maybe a photo of the product
or maybe a video of the product, sometimes you get these review stars. You don't want
to replace those things with a picture of whatever dork wrote the product description.
You want people to see the product, right? And you can read this study later, but this
is an e-commerce company whose traffic dropped 90% after setting up Authorship because they
replaced all their beautiful product rich snippets with some guy who wrote the description
of the tennis racquet. So don't do that. Only do that if you're a
blogger, which most of you in the room are. If you're sharing opinions about marketing,
this is ideal. If you're in e-commerce or maybe if you're a restaurant or something
that sells a product, you want people to see the product, not some guy's face. So just
a little word of warning there. Now, Authorship was established last March,
March of 2012, so it's been around a little while. AuthorRank has been a hot topic since
last September, so it's about a year old. Authorship adoption has really taken off in
the past few months because people are talking about this. This is a study from Conductor.
They did this last May, a few months ago, and they say that 87% of the top 500 tech
writers use Google+ and 74% of them have Authorship. Now, I would suspect that that number is going
to be 100% by the end of the year. So we're kind of in the later stage of adoption here.
Last year was sort of the early stage of adoption, so if you don't do this today or this week,
you might be left a little bit behind. So please do this. There are a lot of benefits.
Brands can take advantage of this too. Some people like to say brand rank, but I don't
really like that. But you can establish Publishership, so you have Authorship for a person, you have
Publishership for a company. So I write for Bloomerang, all of my posts on Bloomerang
have Bloomerang listed as the publisher. I'm the author, Bloomerang is the publisher. So
you do this very similar to how you set up Authorship. You go to your actual brand company
page, you verify the URL to the website or to the blog, and then from the website you
send a signal back in the form of a tag called 'Rel= Publisher', which is very similar to
'Rel= Author'. There are some instructions at the end of these slides on how to do that.
So this really eliminates the need to publish a blog post as a company. I see that on blogs
a lot, you know, this blog post was written by Bloomerang. Well, did the logo sit down
at a computer and write it? Like, you don't need to do that anymore. You can set the brand
as the publisher and then list the actual author as the author, and you can get nice
little rich snippets for doing so. So for your pages, like your 'about us' page, you
can get your company logo or whatever you want to show up there on the search results
rather than someone's face, which is cool because you get added visibility for having
that picture. So an ideal blog post, this is the back end,
the coding of a blog post that I wrote, you can see that I have rel=author to my personal
profile, and I have rel=publisher to the Bloomerang page. So that's an ideal setup. That's what
you want to strive for. There are some instructions in the slides on how to do that. It's not
too terrible. So Authorship has a lot of benefits, you know,
you prepare yourself for AuthorRank and you're feeling good about this. But you can see how
ingrained Google+ is to all of these processes. So this is sort of Google's way of keeping
Google+ relevant, because you have to use Google+ to take advantage of all of these
things. So if you've been a little cold on Google+, it's really sort of time to pay attention
to Google+ because there are a lot of added benefits for doing so.
It's probably not a good idea to think of Google+ as a search engine. I like to think
of it as an identity engine. Google+ is the mechanism for which Google assigns all identity
for content creators and assigns authority to those content creators. So there is verification
that happens on Google+. You can further verify your profile beyond just setting up Authorship.
You can verify your YouTube account and all of your other Google accounts.
You can verify your brand page. This is something that's really powerful. You get a nice little
checkmark similar to the checkmark you see on Twitter for maybe reporters or celebrities,
you can get that for your brand page, and something really incredible happens when you
do that. You have to have 1,000 fans and then you can apply for verification, and you can
do so at this little link right here. Once you have 1,000 fans and you get that verification
on your company page, something crazy happens. Something happens in the algorithm where Google
gives you a little bit more weight. This is the Slingshot SEO Google+ page. You can see
it took us a few months to get to 1,000 fans, but when we had 1,000 fans and we got the
page verification, the followership increased exponentially. Something crazy happened, because
people see that badge, they see that you're verified and think, oh, this is a legit company,
they must be sharing really great stuff. We didn't do anything different. We shared one
post a day at 9:00 a.m., and we didn't do anything different, and it just skyrocketed.
I'm getting excited, because the Bloomerang page is about 850, so I'm getting close to
that 1,000 mark. But this is a good goal for you guys to strive
for. Try to get to 1,000 and then get that verification, because I don't have to tell
you what those new followers did to referral traffic and new shares and +1s.
Okay, so what if you get all those fans? Well, the more fans you have on Google+, the more
people are going to +1 your stuff -- that's the same as liking your page. Google+ is consistently
named the number one ranking factor for Google. This is the Searchmetrics report; the SEOmoz
report also lists it I think as number two. So Google+ is really important, guys. You
want +1s, you want people sharing your site, because there's a strong correlation between
rankings and how many +1s you have on your content. So if you don't have a +1 button
on your blog, definitely add one today. This is a study from SEOmoz that came out
a couple of months ago. They said after page Authority, a URL's number of Google +1s is
more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, the correlation
of Google +1s beat out other well-known metrics, including links, Facebook shares, and keyword
usage. So they're saying it's a correlation that doesn't necessarily mean causation, but
it's definitely something to look at and consider. So you want a robust personal profile, you
want a robust brand page, you want +1s, because your rankings are going to improve, hopefully.
This is a study -- this first one is the actual study where this came from. The second one,
definitely read it, it actually came out yesterday, he debunks this a little bit, so there are
opposing opinions out there. It's important not to take one study as gospel. You know,
definitely look at all these different things and decide for yourself. But I would definitely
recommend that you put Google+ at the forefront of maybe your social media usage, for sure.
Now, when you share a Google+ link, it's a little bit different than on Facebook. When
you share a Facebook link, you get one link to that webpage that you're sharing. But on
Google+, you get three links. You get a link to your personal page, so that can maybe help
with AuthorRank. The second link you get is a link to the actual posts, and Google+ posts
actually show up on Google search results now, too. And the third of course is the link
to the actual page, and link equity follows through to that. It's a follow link, so that
increases your +1s. Everyone who shares it after that +1s also increase, and then if
they actually hit the +1 button, it increases. So if you do those things, you can suddenly
get a lot of +1s pretty fast. So when you think about the Agent Rank patent,
you know, going back to those three terms, a high reputational score, so Google+ following
is how I infer that. Established reputation, you have Authorship and valuable content,
you're publishing a lot, you're publishing good content. That's kind of the secret recipe
for AuthorRank, right? Authorship, Google Authorship, frequent publishing and Google+
usage. If you guys master these three things, you're going to be in good shape.
So, to sort of sum all this up, these are some takeaways. Create an author page and
an author bio. So if you have Bloomerang/blog/author/Steven, if you don't have that for all your blog posts,
definitely create that. Obviously, establish Google Authorship. I've been saying that ad
nauseam. Add a Google+ badge to your website. That may increase the amount of people who
follow you, because they can follow you right from your blog. Obviously, have a complete
Google+ profile. Verify your name so when you get to 1,000 followers, you can verify
your name and get that nice checkmark. And publish frequently, and focus on one area
of expertise. When you think about all those quotes from the Google guys, they keep saying
'expert content'. Well, an expert doesn't write about ten different things, right? I
write about Google Authorship and this stuff a lot. I don't necessarily consider myself
an expert, but it would be weird for me to write about this and then maybe write about
graphic design or CRO or video or all these other things. So, you know, maybe choose an
area of focus that you really know about and that'll help you out a lot.
And then use Google+ prolifically, share your stuff on there. Don't go out and spam Google+
just to get a lot of +1s. Be thoughtful about it, be responsible about it. And then definitely
put that +1 button on your blog posts. Things to avoid. Don't publish a blog post
by the company name. Somebody wrote that, just give it to them, who wrote it. Somebody
wrote that software update or press release or all these other things that tend to get
published by the brand name. Just give it to the person who wrote it. It's no big deal.
By guest author, if you accept guest posts to your site, give them a user name and an
author page, don't publish under guest author. If someone is taking the time to write a 1,000
word post for you, for your website, give them a little more than 'this is by guest
author.' That doesn't make anyone feel really great about it.
Don't attribute someone else's post to you. So, similar to the guest author thing, sometimes
I see, you know, if someone put a guest post on Bloomerang it would be under my name, but
then there would be a little byline at the end saying, 'this post was written by' whoever.
Don't do that, because no one's going to be able to take advantage of Authorship.
And then the last two things, ghost written blog posts and outsourced blog posts, I don't
have any evidence to suggest that those things are going to harm you, but be careful. Google
is talking about transparency and anonymity and not being anonymous, so be careful if
you do those things. Google wants content from the actual source that you're listing
there. So watch out for those things. These are some awesome articles that I referenced
before. These are sort of the first two articles that really got the AuthorRank discussion
happening last September. So check those out. There are also some really great instructions
on setting up Authorship, doing the rel=author, doing the rel=publisher, different website
CMSs, all those things, you can check them out there. So do that. There's some great
information, way more than I can cover in 40 minutes on this topic. So do a little reading
if this interests you in the slightest. So, I'll leave it at that. I think we have
15 minutes for questions. Woman: So I have, for my blog, I set up a
new Gmail address for that, and they gave me a Google+ profile connected to that Gmail
address. I don't want to use that one, I'd rather use my personal one because I've had
it longer, I've got people in circles there. Do I delete the other one? What's your suggestion?
Steven: Yeah, I'm glad you asked that, this came up at Mixwest, too. I'll answer it with
an example. When I started at Bloomerang, our whole company is on Google Apps, so we
use Gmail for our company email, and maybe some of you also do that. They also had a
duplicate Google+ account, so we had Authorship spread out all over, some were using their
personal, some were using the company. Ideally, you only want one, so use your personal profile.
Use the one with the most followers. If you have a second Google+ profile, you can close
it without deleting your Gmail address. So only one Google +account for one Authorship.
So yeah, just one. So, the question is, what happens when an
employee leaves? I purposely left this out of the presentation because it's a huge issue.
A lot of employers don't want to do this for their employees, but it's my opinion that
they should. I'll give you an example. I used to work at
Slingshot SEO. I wrote probably 100 blog posts that are still on their website. I think I
still have Authorship -- I hope I do. It would be really stupid for them to take it away,
and here's why. They still get the rich snippets, so people who are searching for those things,
there is still higher visibility for that content. So they are still getting traffic
even though I don't work there, and they are benefiting from my AuthorRank. AuthorRank doesn't leave,
it stays with the content. So it stays with the content regardless of where that person
works. So as long as they don't delete the content on their blog and leave that author
bio, it doesn't really matter, it's still driving traffic. It's still piggybacking on
my authority as an author. So it would be dumb for a company to get rid of Authorship,
even if someone moves away. They should be happy if they left and they're still blogging
and still active on social media, they're still going to drive traffic to that content
ultimately. So that's my opinion on that. Woman: When you talk about adding, you know,
multiple blogs that you contribute to to your Google+ profile, how closely tied do the topics
need to be? Because you mentioned, you know, if you're talking about different things,
it's going to hurt you. So if I'm talking -- I've got my [indiscernible 38:18] blog,
I also have a lot about Indianapolis, so they're kind of both brands, but how does Google make
sense of that? Steven: Those are different topics, for sure,
but you as an author are central to all those things. So if you're transparent about who
you are, who your identify is, I think you'll be fine. I think the danger is for marketers
who maybe go out and write a blog post about something that they're not really an expert
in, that can come back to haunt you a little bit. Aside from AuthorRank and all this other
stuff, you shouldn't be doing that, you know? If you're not an expert in something, you
know, don't write about it. That's the real danger. If you're writing about a lot of different
topics that truly interest you and that you're definitely an expert on or have some reason
to write about, I think you'll be fine. I don't know how AuthorRank and rankings will
factor into all that stuff, no one knows. Only the people at Google know. But I think
you'll be fine, honestly. Woman: So you said that ghost bloggers might
be harmed by this. Steven: Yeah.
Woman: How would Google know if you have Authorship set up in a client's name?
Steven: They're not going to know. Technology exists out there that can match an author
to their content. I think there's a Stanford professor who's created this crazy algorithm
that matched 100 different writing samples to 100 different authors. If Google wanted
that technology, they could probably get it and implement it. But I think we're years
away from that. So for ghost blogging, what I would say is make sure the voice is consistent
for all the things that are being written, because if the voice changes from one blog
post to another, somebody's going to call you out. The danger is someone calling you
out, not Google calling you out, but someone saying, hey, this is ***, this person
didn't write this. This is way different from another one. That's the danger. Don't worry
about Google so much, but be careful. That's why I said be careful on that slide. I have
no idea how Google is going to deal with that issue. We're probably years away from that,
honestly. Woman: So historically back on the ghost blogging
thing but a little bit about authenticity in general, I'm [indiscernible 40:26] for
my friend and editing a blog for an IT company. My passion is not IT, my passion is marketing,
so it doesn't really make sense I don't think to put my name on all those posts that I'm
writing. Would it make sense instead to put maybe for my team, like ghost write for people
on my team and [indiscernible 40:53] for them? Steven: My sense is don't do that. That makes
me feel a little queasy. I don't know why exactly, and there's no evidence to suggest
that that's going to harm you, but you wrote that stuff. You wrote it, you are the author,
and you work there, you have some expertise, so I would keep it under your name, for sure.
And I would encourage the other people in your company to also write.
Woman: [indiscernible 41:17] Steven: And that's really hard, I know that's
really hard. And you can make connections between your personal interests and IT, you
know? I mean, and you've done that, right? What does some video game have to do with
IT, and you can write those blog posts for days, and that's good content. So I would
challenge everyone to find those connections in their personal lives if they're struggling
to write about a topic that maybe is not their area of expertise. But I would definitely
keep it under your name, honestly. So she's wondering if changing career trajectory
later on is going to harm you. I don't think so. I mean, I can't predict the future, but
they're still writing samples, you know? You can still point to them and say, hey, I'm
a good writer, I was writing about a different topic, but you should hire me because I can
write about this topic or whatever. So I wouldn't worry too much, honestly.
I think that he was saying that he wrote some blogs about something that he did a lot of
research on and became an expert and should he put his name on it, and I would say yes,
again, the same as Kayla, you know, you wrote it, you did the research, you did the work,
you are the author. No one else is the author, right? I say try to be an expert, but don't
be too scared by that. I mean, if you put the work in, if the writing makes sense and
is good, you should take credit for it. You know, Google wants authors connected to their
content. They don't want different authors connected to someone else's content. So anything
you write you should claim Authorship for, and feel good about it, too.
So, changing Authorship, so he's wondering if you have Authorship established on one
piece of content and then later attributing it to another. Some weird things can happen
technically. There have been people who have the wrong picture show up on the [search 42:56].
So it says one author's name, but somebody else's author's picture on there. So don't
worry too much about Google, worry about the user. How is that going to look to the user?
Someone who has maybe read that piece of content before under one author, and now suddenly
it's under another one, they're going to think that's a little weird, right? So don't worry
as much about what's going to happen on Google, but think of the user and the reader. So I
would say don't change Authorship ever. It's okay if that person is no longer with the
company, you can still list them as the author. 99% of the readers aren't going to know that
person doesn't work at the company anymore unless they do a lot of crazy research, which
would be creepy and weird. So I think you'll be fine. Definitely I would not change Authorship
under any circumstances, honestly. So, wise to go back and add Authorship? Definitely.
You can go and add Authorship for a blog post that is ten years old. You can go do that
right now. If there is something that doesn't have authorship, Google Authorship, established
but was listed under a company name, go back and change it to the actual author. You'll
be fine, you're not going to be penalized or anything. And you get all those benefits
that I've gone through. So if you have posts under a company name, I would change those.
That's probably the only exception to what I told Tom. But if you've written for blogs,
you know, email them today and say, hey, do you offer Google Authorship? They might say
yes. If they say no, you know, it's not the end of the world. They may say, hey, what's
that, and you can tell them, and maybe they'll do it and you can get all these great things
for all that hard work you've done. I've done that. I've gone back to a blog post that I've
written for that didn't have this, you know, three or four years ago, but in the last year
they have. They just didn't add it because I didn't ask them or they didn't think about
it. So yeah, definitely do that for sure. So she asks, if you are the company doing
the ghost writing. You can, you can certainly set up Authorship
for the person you're ghost writing for. I would just be careful.
Woman: You'd put the name [indiscernible 44:52] on there?
Steven: Yeah. Woman: [indiscernible 44:54]?
Steven: I think so, yeah. I think you can do that in that case. You can set up Authorship,
for sure. The ghost writing piece is more for the reader. Make sure if someone is getting
multiple posts ghost written for them, they all have kind of the same voice and the same
style if you're going to set up Authorship. Okay, thanks, guys.