Google’s Authorship Markup

Google’s mandate is to make search quicker, easier, and more relevant for users. This explains why the world’s largest search engine developed “rich snippets,” which would allow webmasters to markup pages so they would be more easily crawled. The result is that sites could improve rankings, and users would have more precise results. Google has added authorship tags to its collection, so sites with content written by specific authors can be identified quickly and easily.

What does this mean? For users, it means more relevant searches for specific authors. For writers, it means you can Google yourself with more accuracy. That’s always important. For Google, it could possibly mean that they could replace internal search engines or author pages, gain more access to data habits to develop more targeted marketing. For SEO? It means being better able to highlight a particular author and increase visibility. How does it work?

Google will crawl websites looking for “rel-author.” This will help searchers find work by the author, instead of just about the author, even if those works are within a larger publication. Google illustrates how it will work as follows: “if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles,” Times’ web developers will be able to “connect these titles with a New York Times author page,” which is data-rich.

Thus far, only a handful of sites have the authorship tag option enabled, but look for it to become more of a presence very soon.