How soon before author rank becomes a major ranking factor?

[sanj5050]

Hi,

I wanted to pose a question

How soon do guys think itll be before author rank becomes a one of Googles major ranking factors?

From what I can see the way they have designed it signals that it is only matter of time, before they start using it as a major ranking factor...

And I have a question on Author ranks impact on the ability to sell a blog/site in the future. Surely if the blog is tied to an author(s) and the ranking of the site in the search engine is somewhat based on this authors author rank who is a part of the site/blog, then it becomes harder to sell the property if the author is not going to be a part of the property after the sale?.

I look forward to your responses on this,

[MikeGeorge]

This is something that I've had many heated debates about, but I think I proved that Author Rank is a factor, and this is how I did it...and it was a mistake by the way. But you could try it too.

(Unfortunately, because my client data is confidential, I can't share too many intimate details.)

I had a client who has a responsive WP theme. However, they have so much content, the responsive theme just isn't the best solution-- not as good as a mobile site-- for this particular client.

I put up a mobile site at mobile.example.com and I set up the canonical link to point to the main domain, just as it should. The mobile site was also a WP site.

However, when I made the mobile site, I accidentally left myself as the author. (I built the mobile site before I added the site owner as a user.)

A couple of weeks later, MY FACE started appearing in the Google results instead of the attorney. In other words, the attorney used to rank on page 2 for "What are the consequences of DUI in Arizona?"

And it was at something like: example.com/consequences-dui-az-something

But suddenly mobile.example.com/consequences-dui-az-something  appeared on page one of Google, with my face. The rankings changed and Google preferred to believe that I was the author, rather than the attorney with his brand new authorship.

So even though I added duplicate content and a canonical tag, Google preferred the content that was authored by me, and chose to display that over the identical content that the attorney wrote and had been previously indexed and given author credit for. All of a sudden, the mobile site took precedence. When I changed authorship back to the attorney, rankings dropped slightly again and Google chose to display the MAIN site (as it should have), rather than the mobile.

I don't care what anyone (even Matt Cutts) says about Authorship. I've seen a real life example. Perhaps they are using it in certain markets and not others. But when it comes to attorneys, my primary client, I've seen it matter.

[TakeshiYoung]

This is definitely on Google's todo list, but who knows when it will be an actual factor. As AJ Kohn says, build your authority, not your authorank. Focus on becoming an authority in your niche, and you will see benefits for SEO & your business regardless of whether Google implements authorank or not. And if they do, you should be well positioned to take advantage of it.

There are definitely things you can do to prepare for the coming changes (build up your profile on Google+, use rel=author on content you create, create a Wikipedia page), but as far when Google will roll it out, I doubt even Google's engineers know about it at this point.

As far as selling a blog, the question of author has always been an issue. If a famous author sells their blog to someone less well known, will people still read it? As far as search, the impact of authorrank should be minimal, all the old posts would still have the authorship boost of the old author, only newly authored posts would not. If the blog has a high enough authority, I could even see people buying blogs to increase their own authority in the niche.

[ThompsonPaul]

A.J. Kohn just posted last week about how, from his information, the Authorship Project at Google is actually dead. Not that the concept of authorship is going away completely, but that there will be "a change in tactics from Authorship markup to entity extraction as a way to identify experts and a pathway to using Authorship as a ranking signal."
http://moz.com/community/q/trending-bugs-in-moz-analytics

It's a really interesting read, and makes great sense, especially considering the direction Hummingbird has taken toward improving the Knowledge Graph. Given the amount of work still ahead on the entity extraction process, I suspect it will some time (a year?) before we start seeing authorship elements begin impacting rankings. And with the way the SERP pages are going, by then there may not be any actual "ranking" process to speak of.

As far as "ranking of of sites in search engines" with regard to selling sites, etc... Google essentially tries to rank pages, not sites. Obviously a site's other pages benefit from the halo effect of other strong pages and brand recognition, but if we follow their logic on author influence, as long as the "good" author's content remains on the site, it should still rank, regardless of whether or not the author still writes for that site (see current implementation of Authorship and how it references sites and author as a "former contributor").

I suspect the algorithm may be taught how to detect when the newer content on a site isn't as "influential" or trustworthy as the older content, and adjust the "halo effect" accordingly.

Google's got their work cut out for them to implement some sort of "authority ranking" (my term) that takes into account the famous, but doesn't burn the smart but lesser-knowns the way their current focus on big brands burns the often-more-valuable smaller sites.

As Takeshi says - building authority and trust in all the organic ways possible is a beneficial strategy, regardless of the specifics of how authorship plays out.

Good question, and as always in web marketing... interesting times ahead.

Paul

[SEO5Team]

Good response Paul.