Two months ago I explained how Google Plus Authorship Markup can help your blog stand out at Google search results. It turns out that linking your Google plus account within your posts not only boosts your blog’s ranking but also increases the likelihood advertisers wanting to buy links from your posts! At least that’s what a case study by Orit Mutznik revealed. Orit, an experienced SEO and blogger, was the first to let me know of authorship’s power. She has helped several bloggers incorporate the authorship markup inside their posts, perfecting the link building process since the outbound links are now much more valuable in Google’s eyes! Who needs Pagerank when you could have a high Author Rank?!
Well, that statement is not exactly true but it does prove the value of author rank. For years website owners and bloggers have manipulated Google pagerank for better blog ranking. Now Google has come up with a plan and Google plus is here to help. I can’t count the times I have found duplicate content of my blogs in several online domains. Imagine if there was a way for Google to know beforehand who the original author was. It would then rank duplicate content lower and the original post would most probably appear in search’s top positions. Making use of the author rank Google now discriminates the articles, recognizing the author of the original post and adding points to his authoring reputation. Thus, a high author rank would lead to better post ranking. Combine that with a good blog Pagerank and you have the perfect combination for your blog ranking!
On the other hand author rank will help when building a new blog from scratch as well, as long as you are a reputable author. Given the fact a new blog will have null Pagerank, your first posts won’t go unnoticed by Google, since it already regards you as a high-valued author! Perhaps they will boost the new blog’s pagerank quicker, although that is left to be proven. For the time being though, every post you make has a link building value for advertisers who are looking for incoming links. Despite the fact that the link may be coming from a low ranking URL pagerank-wise, the link would still have enough value depending on your author rank! And better ranking usually means money!
For example, Orit’s study proved that blog pages, which had backlinks from authored blogs or posts, ranked much better (top position for weeks) than blog pages created on the same date and targeting the same highly competitive keywords, which had the same number of backlinks albeit not from authored blogs! Authorship is beginning to make sense online and Google plus has finally found some use! Reputable authors need to be careful now, since keyword stuffing and excessive linking from their posts might actually harm their author rank. And when it comes to link building, blog and author rankings are crucial.
