Google and Authored Content on Your Website

Google and Authored Content on Your Website

Beginning on June 7 Google announced on their blog that they were going to begin supporting authorship markup. This currently is an experiment in which they are using data to help people find content from great authors in their search results.

Thus, if a webmaster has many authors on their website they can now use what Google called "authorship markup" for your site. If the webmaster has an author page that describes and identifies the author, they can connect the author's articles through that author page.

The markup that Google uses is in accordance with existing standards, such as HTML5(rel="author") and XFN (rel="me"). This will enable search engines to identify the work by the same author across the web. They have been doing some testing from CNET, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly and others to get an
idea of how it will work.

If it works, it will bring the quality authors to the forefront. And for those that write articles, the new standards will require you to step your writing up a couple of notches, or risk not being noticed. Does that mean spun articles are out? I don't know, but I hope so.

If you ever seen a poorly written spun article, you would know why I say that. A lot of authors that spin an article don't take the time to read the article. They just put it out on the Internet with all its joined letters and ill-chosen words, making the article unreadable.

So enough on spun articles, if you want to learn more about implementing authorship markup, check out Google Webmaster Central Authorship.