Not long ago the internet was alive with Google’s Authorship Program believing that it could revolutionise the already revolutionary exponential growth of Content Marketing.

The argument was that there was going to be an “Authorship rank”. And that this would be directly related to how often each author wrote, how many websites they wrote on and of course, relevant to how much quality was in the content.

These three factors would then be combined to give a rough estimate of the Rank of an Author. So if you have an author write a blog post on your website who is associated with only one other website and whilst they do write consistently, the quality isn’t great and it doesn’t get that much traffic, this might not be a big bonus to your website.

However if you get quite a few different authors who all publish great content on a couple of popular sites in your industry, and you get them to write for you, their Author Rank will pass onto your site, boosting your SEO.

Sadly, no one knows if this is the case or not. And now it looks like all that speculation was for naught. Google Authorship is set to be changing as we know it. The main reason for this seems to be participation, or rather, the lack of it. Not enough top quality authors are in the Authorship programme so to use authorship and author rank as ranking indicators could cause some pretty large and well known blogs to lose rankings because of it.

The good news however, is that Authorship markup still increases click through rates from the SERPs and the markup is here to stay. So if you STILL haven’t added Google Authorship to your blog, you need to.

Blog Post by Greg McVey