Acting on advice I recently signed up for Google Author Ranking. Google is apparently changing the way it rates content for SEO purposes by looking for quality original content. One of the ways Google determines original content is by linking that content with a specific author.
Having gone through what appeared to be a hit and miss process in establishing the “Authorship” (you will notice a Google+ link at the bottom right of the main page of this blog) I’ve suddenly started to get a lot more Google Alerts highlighting mentions of my name. These links can be quite old but that doesn’t matter. It’s a sign that the Google system knows it’s me being mentioned in online articles.
So it does, at a very cursory glance, seem that getting signed up for Google Author Ranking is worthwhile. There is a long dialogue going on about what Google is trying to achieve in evolving its methods of search ratings. Not the least of the debating points is the idea that Google is trying to increase monetisation of its search product at the expense of traditional PR Agencies – check out this ZDNet article here.
Now I am a Google fan. I use a lot of the company’s products. However this does make you wonder whether the company is using its significant market power in an anti competitive way. Google is certainly being very clever.
One the one hand who can argue with changes that improve the quality of your search results. On the other hand tying people more and more to the Google ecosystem is in the long run likely to lead to less choice and a more costly product. The market is too complicated and global for anyone to regulate against this as we did in the UK for example with the old BT monopoly of the communications market (we also seem slowly to be regressing to the old monopolistic state in the UK).
I’m not sure anyone would be able to articulate how you would make changes to a Google monopoly in any case. In the meantime I think we just have to get on and figure out how best we live in the Google world. What are we going to do? Stop trying to get online visibility just because we think Google is trying to make even more money out of us?
That’s all folks.
2 replies on “Google Author Ranking”
I think Google is trying to extend itself into as many areas of your life as possible and is succeeding in ways Microsoft could only have dreamt of back in the days of its wars with the DoJ.
In fact I fully expect once Obama completes his second term and they have a President that doesn’t seek advice from Google employees that this may well be on the cards.
I do have to say though, I recently purchased a Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 and am quite impressed with Android now I have hardware that performs its primary purpose of being a phone extremely well and also allows me to check and respond to my e-mail along with a bit of TVCatchup, Angry Birds and Tetris.
Whether or not I’ll start to use every service the company provides over time I don’t know but I do think at some point someone might need to put the brakes on the multicoloured juggernaut.
As a Web PR person since 1995, I ought to take umbrage about Google seemingly trying to step on the patch of online PR and marketing agencies. The truth is though, sadly, that there are far too many online marketing companies screwing both large and small companies out of more than just a few bucks by playing on ignorance. There are so many thousands of ways (and new ones each day) to promote a company online, and yet the vast majority of the IM and PR companies stick to a few “tried and tested” strategies. Some of which, if I was Google, would drive me spare that businesses are still falling, and paying, for it.
Search engine and directory submission – £99? Give me a break! Article marketing via article banks (with optimised footers and some keyword stuffed HTML of course)? Yeah, why not? Um. Not.
Got a great in-house writer eg a Tref? Build a strategy (for free) around the company and individual LinkedIn pages, Twitter accounts, Flickr, Google+, Facebook (if you have to), etc etc and optimise the hell out of it for ALL the search engines, not just Google, with your regularly brainstormed keyword list that gets your company found, time and time again. Simples. Total gain to Google? Well, more relevant results for starters!