Friday, May 17, 2013

Google Continues To Experiment & Expand Authorship

If one theme was abundantly clear at SMX West in March, it was the question over the importance of authorship and how it might impact future rankings in Google.

During the “What’s Needed For SEO Success In 2013 & Beyond?” panel, I asked Matt Cutts if Google planned to expand authorship credit (and potentially the rich snippet) beyond just written content (like blog posts) and begin incorporating other content types.

In reality, content creators could truly author various types of content, including photos for photographers or video for videographers. Just because a piece of content isn’t part of the written medium doesn’t mean that content has no author.

Matt indicated that while the majority of content that Google sees on the Web is written, there are clearly other types of content Google indexes and wants to be able to understand authorship for.

Google is certainly doing its part to infer authorship of content, even when authorship markup has not been applied to a particular page. Over the past six months, there have been several examples of Google erroneously crediting the wrong authors with content, such as when a New York Times article credited Truman Capote with a new article, even though Capote has been deceased for nearly 30 years.

Google has even inferred authorship over other types of semantic markup on the page. On my own site, our archived webinar pages, which are coded with video schema and previously were displaying a video rich snippet, suddenly reverted to authorship instead, even though the page was not coded with author data:



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