AuthorRank 14 Ways to Connect

Google can track fourteen AuthorRank connections between your verified digital identity and content you publish anywhere online. That includes websites where you author content, as well as your social media sites. And, there are several important loops that Google wants you to close to ensure that the right author is getting credited. And you’ll want to close them too, to ensure that scraper sites are not taking advantage of your good reputation. See why getting AuthorRank setup properly is one of the most critically important tasks you’ll do this year.

What Makes AuthorRank So Important?

Google wants to ensure that each time someone does a query, they are being served the most authoritative and relevant information possible. To help Google sort the great content from the junk, and from the duplicate content, they’ve enlisted the aid of online authors in an effort to identify what’s worth showing, and who originally published it. That’s what AuthorRank is all about. It helps Google identify the original author of high quality, highly relevant content.

The Perks of AuthorRank

You need to make sure that Google can properly identify you as the author. You also need to write the best content you can. In return, Google is going to rank your content higher and give you an extra perk.

It’s going to show your happy face in what are known as Rich Snippets, like the one shown below.

Making the Connections

The little Rich Snippet above has clues to three of the AuthorRank connections I’ve made between my site and my Google+ Profile. They include:

• A link from the post to my Author Page on my site via the rel=”author” tag.
• A link from my Author Page to my G+ Profile via the rel=”me” tag
• A link from my G+ Profile back to my site via Google’s internal tags.

Sounds simple, right? There are actually seven different places you can make those three connections. On top of that, there are seven more places to make necessary connections too.

In total, there are 14 connections you can make to fully close all of the necessary loops with AuthorRank.

Why Closing the Loop is Important

The reason that you link your Author page to your G+ profile and then link your G+ profile back to your Author page is to close the loop between two of your digital identities. One of your identities is on your Author page. Your other is on G+, which Google considers your verified digital identity. If you don’t close the loop between these two, anyone could write a post and use rel=”author” linked to your G+ account and it would attribute the content to you. But, if your G+ profile does not link back to the content, it cannot be verified by Google and is not attributed to you in SERPs. You want to close this loop to ensure that a spammy site does not take advantage of your good reputation by making it look like you provided them with content you did not actually write.

Help is Here

Want to get all of your Google perks? My SEO and AuthorRank Video Course will take you step-by-step through making all 14 AuthorRank connections and get all of your site SEO squared away. Plus, I’ll show you how to coordinate your on-page SEO efforts for maximum benefit.