{"id":52430,"date":"2013-08-22T07:19:29","date_gmt":"2013-08-22T05:19:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.humanlevel.com\/sin-categorizar\/author-rank-agent-rank-y-authorship.html"},"modified":"2013-08-22T09:18:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-22T07:18:00","slug":"author-rank-agent-rank-and-authorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.humanlevel.com\/en\/blog\/seo\/author-rank-agent-rank-and-authorship","title":{"rendered":"Author Rank, Agent Rank, and Authorship: the two sides of the story"},"content":{"rendered":"

About Author Rank<\/h2>\n

Much has been written about Author Rank and its first cousins. Author Rank, Agent Rank and Authorship<\/strong> are three concepts that are obviously related, but do we know the differences between them<\/strong>? Are we sure how to implement authorship markup on our website? In this article we will answer your questions and show you the advantages<\/strong> of putting it into practice.<\/p>\n

When SEO met Social<\/h2>\n

Social networks<\/strong> highlight the individual’s need for interaction with other people and brands, and the permanent feedback between them. They facilitate and democratize the production of content<\/strong> by different social agents and universal access to them. The enormous amount of information often causes infoxication<\/em> and we are unable to discern who are the authors with their own reliable content, who are the amateurs, who are the professionals and who are mere copypasters<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The activity of users on social networks, as well as the huge production of content is gaining prominence in online marketing and this also affects SEO, which is beginning to take social metrics <\/strong> into account (a trend that is expected to increase).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Over time, we have witnessed the integration of Google+ profiles and pages in search results<\/strong> or the various algorithm updates<\/strong> The active presence of brands on social networks, as well as the noise that is generated about them and the contribution they make on social platforms with content that really adds value, are becoming increasingly important. SEO has found the Social and is not about to let it go.<\/p>\n

Let’s start at the beginning: what is Agent Rank?<\/h2>\n

Agent Rank<\/strong> was Google’s first approach to the concept of content authorship. The Agent Rank patent<\/a> first saw the light of day in 2005. It is a digital signature<\/strong> that serves to relate your content to you, whether they are subsets of content within a website (images, videos, links, articles…) or the entire website.<\/p>\n

Agent Rank defines an agent as any individual or entity that provides, edits or reviews portions of the content of a website<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This includes owners, publishers or users. Everyone can declare their role using the tag rel=<\/code> and the attribute, author, publisher or editor<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Where does all this leave Authorship? What is it and what is it for?<\/h2>\n

Authorship<\/strong> refers to the method by which Google can identify that this content is created by a person<\/strong> named X, and also the way in which the authorship information for the content you have created is displayed in the SERPS<\/a>. Authorship is the means, and Author Rank is the end. <\/strong><\/p>\n

With Authorship Google wants to ensure that spammers and fraudulent techniques are kept out of the content creation strategy. With this measure, the authors declared themselves as real people and not anonymous.<\/p>\n

Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson explain all this in this video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So… what is Author Rank?<\/h2>\n

Author Rank is the authority attributed to an author’s content<\/strong>. To start having authority it goes without saying that you have to start creating content and linking it to your Google+ profile.<\/p>\n

To evaluate your authority<\/strong>, we believe it is logical that Google will presumably take into account factors such as +1s, shares, tweets, pingbacks<\/strong> and in general, the natural generation of links to your content. As in other fields, we should think that it also matters where or from whom<\/strong> these mentions and links come from<\/strong>. All this will influence the ranking of your results for certain searches<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

If your articles on comics have more success and recommendations than those on Web Analytics, then you will have more authority in this field and you should rethink a career change.<\/p>\n

How to link my content to my Google+ profile<\/h2>\n

The first step<\/strong> to link your content to your Google+ profile is to go to your Google+ page and add your web address.<\/strong> How? You will need to edit the ‘Contribute to’ section<\/strong> within the ‘Links’ module.<\/p>\n

\"Detail<\/p>\n

The second step<\/strong> is to link your website to your Google+ profile<\/strong> by adding its link followed by the parameter ?rel=author<\/code><\/strong> as exemplified below.<\/p>\n

<a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/012345678910?rel=author<\/strong>\">Nombre del author<\/a><\/code><\/p>\n

But where do I insert the authorship marking? What happens when I am not the only author on my website? What if I want to identify a company page instead of a personal profile?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you are the sole author of your website<\/strong>, as is the case for personal blogs<\/strong>, it will be enough to add the link in the header of the home page of your site<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

If you are part of a team of editors<\/strong>, as may be the case in a corporate website blog or a collaborative blog<\/strong>, you should add a link to your G+ profile on the page of your article in question. A quite convenient option to forget about the issue is to include in the layout of the template of this type of pages a space for a small biography of the author that includes the link to your profile on Google+ or directly the link to it.<\/p>\n

\"Page<\/p>\n

If you want authorship markup for content on your corporate website<\/strong>, you should use the same technique but replace the profile URL with the URL of the Google+ page, and the parameter ?rel=author<\/code><\/strong> by ?rel=publisher<\/code><\/strong>. But first you should check that your Google+ page has your website verified.<\/p>\n

To check that your markup is correctly implemented<\/strong>, we suggest you check it in the ‘Preview’ section of Google’s structured data testing tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With this system of reciprocal linking (from your profile to your website and from your website to your profile) Google makes sure that nobody supplants other people’s identities: I can link from my website to Matt Cuts’ profile, but he won’t link from his profile to my website, so my plan to dominate the world starts badly.<\/p>\n

Advantages of authorship markings<\/h2>\n

The different authoring marks that exist have multiple advantages:<\/p>\n