Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Recently Google+ made it a lot easier for content authors to indicate the sites they publish to. Here’s a short clip showing that new easier process:

So that’s now told Google+ that you are an author for the sites you’ve listed. It also adds a backlink on your Google+ Profile page back to your site.

At this point, once Google has parsed the changes, and updated it’s caches, you’ll start to see author credits on articles with the same name and email address. While the Google help docs ‘suggest’ you have a matching email address published with each post, it’s clearly not a requirement.

So after this update you could start to see ‘published by you’ when doing searches on Google for posts you’ve made but what’s to stop anyone from claiming they wrote something on-line?

The other half of this process is creating a ‘rel=”author”‘ or ‘rel=”publisher”‘ link on the content pages on your blog/web site.

In the case of Beanstalk’s Blog, all posts get the same rel=”publisher” link, it looks like this (you can see it in ‘view-source’):

<link href="https://plus.google.com/115481870286209043075" rel="publisher" />

That makes Google see our blog posts as ‘published’ by our Google+ Profile, which is a bit ‘lazy’, but the process to add that code was very easy (and we blogged about it here) compared to the task of tagging each post with a custom link.

The truth is that there has to be some ‘ranking signal’ for multiple authors, and there should be a quality/trust grade based on the profiles of the authors. So what is that ‘factor’ that ‘has’ to be hiding in the ranking code? Great question!

Since we’ve already spent some time with Google+ and a single author source we intend to run some tests and prove out the value or lack of it. Our plans are to report on both the difficulty of applying the right tags to the proper posts, and then value of that effort. If anyone reading along has some good suggestions for the test process please drop us a comment via the main contact form.

Where’s Bart?

Chia Bart is retired for now. I need to find a decent webcam and then I’ll re-do him with some time-lapse for added thrills and joy. In the meantime we’re looking at offering the readers a really unique chance at interacting with the blog:

Each month we will be posting some macro images. Each one will be a challenge to figure out and we’ll take guesses on stuff ‘material’ ‘location’ ‘object’ etc.. and then we will rate the guesses based on how close they are. Technically, even if we had one guess like: “The picture for week 2 looks like glass”, that could win!

The best guess will get recognition on our blog and we’ll announce the best guess each month on Twitter as well.

February Macro 2 – If you think you know what this is, or where this is, send us your best guess via Twitter or G+

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 12:14 pm