Finding New Ways to Identify Authoritative Content
www.viralseoservices.com
Tulsa, Oklahoma Call Now: - 1-800-670-2809 Website: - www.viralseoservices.com
Many webmasters markup their content with the author name as a part of their search
engine
optimization
efforts under the
impression that it will boost their Google search ranking. Participation in Google authorship program requires two things: a Google+ profile that links to your published content and published content that references you as the author and links back to your Google+ profile. However, in October 2013, A.J. Kohn, an experienced marketing executive and owner of Blind Five Year Old, an online marketing firm specializing in search, published an article Authorship Is Dead, Long Live Authorship which said that Google has abandoned its classic Authorship project. According to Kohn, Google is focusing on a different method - – entity extraction - to assign Authorship instead and show high quality content in search results. However, he points out that as Google is continuing to display results with authorship markup, it is still a good idea to implement Google Authorship. According to A.J. Kohn, Google Authorship can generate a higher clickthrough rate and build authority; your content would rank better as Google knows that users respond to Authorship. But, he says there are two problems with authorship markup at the same time such as:
www.viralseoservices.com
Authorship Adoption The reason why Google is unable to use Authorship as a ranking signal is that important authors are not participating, says Kohn. As per the study conducted by leading SEO technology company Conductor, around 88% of top tech blogs have not implemented ‘rel = author’ (authorship markup).
An analysis performed by BlueGlass UK, a digital marketing agency revealed that only 3.5% of Fortune 100 companies actively use Google authorship. If reputable authors are not participating, Google can’t use the Authorship as a way to find authoritative content.
www.viralseoservices.com
Limitations in Identifying Authority and Expertise Anyone can post content on Internet. It is who is creating the content and why should you value their opinion that makes the content appealing. Though authorship markup can give some information about the author and his/her expertise, it is not always reliable. There have been several documented cases of Google showing the wrong author for a particular piece of content. Sometimes, webmasters are responsible for such errors. In some cases, Google could be trying to automatically attribute authorship for some reputable author who hasn’t implemented markup. Earlier, Google crawled public social graphs to infer identity or authorship. Even if there was no authorship markup, Google was able to assign authorship by extracting the data via social media circles. However, the search engine giant removed this feature few years ago. Google still needed a mechanism that could identify people and their areas of expertise more accurately.
Entity Extraction – New Approach to Identify Authors In order to identify authors, Google is now looking for entities - that happen to be people - rather than concentrating on specific markup. With the Hummingbird algorithm, Google has widely adopted semantic search (considering the meaning of the search term) instead of relying on keywords. This is surely a sign of entity extraction. A.J.Kohn says
www.viralseoservices.com
Google has the following options for such extraction:
ď ś Freebase Annotations of the ClueWeb Corpora (FACC) FACC consist of ClueWeb09 FACC and ClueWeb12 FACC and around 11 billion phrases that refer to concepts and entities are there in Freebase which
were
automatically
labeled
with
their
unique
identifiers
(Freebase MID’s). Google can identify an entity within the text of a particular document and match it to a Freebase identifier (as shown below).
As not every ClueWeb document is included in this corpus, there is chance that a document may be excluded because no entities to be found.
www.viralseoservices.com
Google Plus Profiles If Google prefers a smaller set of entities to assign Authorship, then Google + is a huge entity platform with a massive database of people. It is the knowledge graph of everyday people. Authorship is now defined as Google’s ability to extract entities from documents, matching them to the descriptors of that entity (for example, social profiles, official page, subjects) and measuring the activity around the extracted entities.
The Bottom line To sum up, authorship markup alone can’t alone make your content authoritative and drive traffic. You need to build your authority by producing
quality
content
with
comprehensive
and
up-to-date
information, engage that content within your community and find methods to add yourself to entity resources including Wikipedia and Freebase. Though authorship markup can increase the confidence level of the match with the descriptors, it plays a supporting and refining role rather than a defining role.
www.viralseoservices.com