What Does Google+ Authorship Mean for SEO?

We’ve all heard the old saying that Content is King, but it has never been truer than it is today. With Google updates in the past two years, content has become extremely important. Publish low quality content and your site will be penalized. Publish high-quality content and you have a chance for success. Why just a chance? Because that content has to be seen, read and shared. Google+ authorship doesn’t guarantee any of these things, by any means, but it does seem to help the process along.

Here are a few ways Google+ Authorship can help your site:

A picture is worth a thousand words – When you publish an article as a Google Plus author, your pretty old mug will show up in search results. This may or may not help with SEO (it’s debatable), but it definitely helps your listing stand out above all others.
A catalog of published works – When you’re a Google+ author, all of your articles will automatically be connected, so people can see everything you’ve written. Fame and fortune? Probably not. But if you’re like most Plus authors, each of your articles has to do with your business (or businesses), so it can help position you as an expert in the eyes of the reader, and possibly Google too.
Automatic analytics – With Plus authorship, you’ll be able to track content you’ve written based on clicks and impressions through Google Analytics. This is helpful for SEO because not all articles are published on your own site, so it can offer insight that you wouldn’t otherwise be privy to, and it’ll give you an idea of which are your strongest articles. Maybe you want to point some links there to boost them even further, or maybe you want to share them on your social media accounts.

There is a lot of speculation around how much weight authorship carries in Google’s algorithm, but based on what we already know, it’s worthwhile. If it so happens to boost your rankings simply by being in existence, then that’s a perk we’ll take. It’s more likely that Google is tracking the popularity of each article and counting that in its algorithm, which would mean that again, quality content has become even more important than it was before (and that’s saying a lot).

How to Claim Google + Authorship

If you have an email address that matches your domain, claiming authorship is easy. You simply have to add your email address to the authorship page on your Google Plus account, and everything else falls into place. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy. What if you use a Gmail address or an email from another domain? Well, you can make it work by pasting a line of code to your author’s bio on each site you write for:

<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>

Next, add a link to each site you’ve written for in the “Contributor To” section of your Google Plus account. It’s that easy. Now, you’re a Google+ author.