Eric Schmidt: SERPs With Authorship Profiles Will Rank Higher

[engine]

We've said it before here at WebmasterWorld, your Google profile will impact SERPs.

Google's Eric Schmidt confirms it.

Search engines: “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”[blogs.wsj.com ]

[Whitey]

I think it's worth noting, whilst acknowledging Google's intent, that there are a lot of issues to overcome to implement G+ and authorship etc effectively for ranking purposes.

A lot of members have expressed some of these, and there are many more practical conflicts. That's why I think Google hasn't rushed into this. It's coming, but I don't think with a bang ..... more of a very measured approach.

Eric Schmidt is kinda hellbent on cleaning up the cesspool of results as he put it a few years back, which is why all manipulative ranking techniques in major verticals have been largely eliminated and replaced by brand. But the time it will take, and the the relative ease of technology required to compete may let competitors step up a gear.

That's why I think Google is changing its focus from search to knowledge as they see the defense of their core product becoming more vulnerable and growth in advertising maybe stalling.

[tedster]

Google wants to know who you are, so that it can market to you

Eric Schmidt is kinda hellbent on cleaning up the cesspool of results

I think things might go a LOT further than that. Have you noticed how much Mr. Schmidt goes to Washington? I'm guessing that the main driver behind the removal of online anonymity is the US government (and maybe Interpol) and I'd also guess this movement impacts other big online businesses beyond Google. It's just that we follow Google a lot more closely.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I think things might go a LOT further than that.

Who is Mr Schmidt to decide that I have to plaster my mug online just to rank? We'll need an answer to that soon.

[backdraft7]

If after a dozen years, Google doesn't know I authored my pages, then their data collection method is broken, like their search engine.

This is simply another lame attempt by Google to force us into G+ accounts we don't want.
I picked up 800 new likes on FB last week due to a email invite I sent to my customer base.
That was from over 30,000 members, many expired, but regardless, 800+ had FB accounts already (and it's still increasing daily).
I sent a similar invite to our G+ page a month earlier and got ZERO new likes or friends in G+.

Guess what happened to my organic listings last week? That's right, they dropped like a rock!
I'll give you one guess as to why...

Social is about people, and the people are not and WILL not gravitate to G+, EVER!

Facebook is the cool guy, G+ is the pimply nerd in a bad suit with a clip on tie.
Do the math...

Just sayin'

[tedster]

Who is Mr Schmidt to decide that I have to plaster my mug online just to rank? We'll need an answer to that soon.

Simple, he's an official of the search engine involved. That certainly gives him a major say in the matter. He never said you can't rank at all without Authorship mark-up - just that you will be able to rank higher.

I certainly understand why you may not like it, but I do think you're swimming against the tide.

< hint: well crafted pen names are doing pretty well in authorship mark-up right now.
There is a centuries-old tradition of pen names, after all. >

[Play_Bach]

@backdraft7
> I'll give you one guess as to why...

Are you saying Google saw your Facebook count go up and countered by dropping your site's rank?

[Play_Bach]

Forgot to add that I'm glad Facebook and Twitter are there and (at least for now) still allow web masters another way to build their base other than Google (which seems to be tightening the noose more and more each day).

[diberry]

The thing is, it doesn't even work offline. Getting a fake identity is incredibly easy for criminals, terrorists, stalkers and the like. With these clean identities, they not only buy stuff but get jobs that put them in positions to cause trouble. We have never operated with anything short of real, legal names in the real world, and look how easily people defeat that when they want to.

Demanding real, legal names online won't affect criminal or terrorist activity at all. It will only affect people who don't want their personal info being sold to corporations, or who have reason to fear specific criminals, stalkers, trolls, etc.

It will just make things nicer for the criminal/trollish element.

As a rule of thumb: laws only impact law-abiders. It's the enforcement of law that effects criminals (and jerks). Demanding legal names will not improve enforcement. It will just give Google better info to share to marketing companies. That's all this is about - Facebook has shown how valuable real names are, and I don't blame other companies for feeling they have to get on the bandwagon. But claims that this will make YouTube a nicer place to comment or something? I don't find them plausible.

[HuskyPup]

diberry +1

Absolutely correct, I've been trying to write precisely the same for the last few days, thank you.

HP

[rubinetto]

diberry, your comment is a good one.

I totally agree with you.

[aristotle]

Yes nice post diberry. The other aspect of this is the idea that Google would reward G+ members with higher organic rankings, as if somehow joining G+ suddenly makes your articles higher quality and more relevant. It's just more evidence that Google no longer cares about the value and quality of its organic search results.

P.S. If I see someone's face in the SERPs, what comes to my mind is that this is probably a spammer or wannabe, and I make sure not to click that result.

[seoskunk]

There's no way most google profiles should imapact search as there #*$!

Badly kept, poor pages from the google social network

Google is this RICH kid that was not invited to the social networking party. So annoyed were they that they started there own party but no one came to that either......

Maybe Google should stick to search

[Convergence]

I think things might go a LOT further than that. Have you noticed how much Mr. Schmidt goes to Washington? I'm guessing that the main driver behind the removal of online anonymity is the US government (and maybe Interpol) and I'd also guess this movement impacts other big online businesses beyond Google. It's just that we follow Google a lot more closely.

Bingo!

[tedster]

Not only that, but I'd guess that Google gives the US government less "roll over" compliance than many other companies do. Despite everything we talk about here, Google still holds the line in many areas - for instance government demands for them to hand over data. Many times they do, but many other times they don't.

[waynne]

Just tried this out on one of my sites. A google authorship page was added 5 days ago. The SERPS are already showing my site with the Authorship photo for 90% of my pages which is really quick.

Any increase in position: No
Any increase in CTR: No
Was it a total waste of my time as I'm now going to get enquiries, spam and silly questions and hate posts against me through yet another social profile I have to watch, maintain and keep a close eye on: Probably but too early to tell so I'm going to give it a bit longer.

(FYI - I have established a reputation on + and started building followers and participating in the community. There are much better social networks out there that actually deliver traffic via an active social profile but G+ does not seem to be one of them.)

[Convergence]

Despite everything we talk about here, Google still holds the line in many areas - for instance government demands for them to hand over data. Many times they do, but many other times they don't.

And the data that it does hand over may be the trade-off to be left alone in other areas.

US Gov is not "supposed" to spy on it's citizens. The Google, however, can collect whatever it can collect. Should what is collected be shared with the Gov, then the Gov has data they themselves are not able to collect about it's citizens - in the form of a 3rd party report...

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I certainly understand why you may not like it, but I do think you're swimming against the tide.

< hint: well crafted pen names are doing pretty well in authorship mark-up right now.
There is a centuries-old tradition of pen names, after all. >

I've been accused of that a few times but I'm just stubborn, I'll say what I think but I'm not going to dwell on it for long.

pen names, they aren't allowed in G+ right now and how are forums going to fare where multiple authors share a page? Google hasn't provided a solution for that have they? Are forums about to lose significant traffic? or have they already?

[mihomes]

Nobody has responded to my last post lol. We have 'pages' setup for our websites and then link to that G+ page using the rel=publisher method.

Would this have the same affect? The 'page' still needs to be created under an actual G+ profile, mine, but it removes MY name from showing and instead links the company 'page' to the company website.

Should we be setting up the rel=author as well? Lots of questions have popped in my head with this one. rel=author would make sense if we were a blog or some kind of article site, but we are not - all pages are created by the company and thats how we wish to keep it. This brings another question, if we were a blog do we still use both or just publisher... just publisher on our pages and adding author when we have an outside source write an article or reference one?

Once again G has made something without outlining the finer details for people to understand. Once this came about I always had a feeling G would this one or the other or both as a means of detecting dupe content. In other words, 30 people have basically the same article yet one person uses rel=author... is this now the 'authority/creator' of the article or page? Of course not, but then again we are talking about Google so I would not put something like that past them.

[aristotle]

Some time ago I noticed that scraped articles that are republiched on blogspot have an author tag added to them giving credit to the blogger (=scraper). I think these tags are added automatically by the blogspot software. I wonder what would have happened if I were a member of G+ and had put my own author tag on these articles before they were scraped. Would the blogspot software replace my tag with the scrapers?

Edit- Now that I think about it, these scrapers probasbly don't copy the source codes of my articles, so any author tag that I added would be lost anyway.

Edit again -- I'm sorry -- My memory was totally confused. It was canonical tags, not author tags, that I noticed that blogspot was adding. Sorry.