TJ33 – Google Authorship: Brand Building For The Search And Social Web with Mark Traphagen

Hey what’s up listeners? Welcome to Traffic Jam, the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and a profitable audience online. You’re tuned in to episode#33 which can you believe it, makes us exactly one-third of the way to a century of episodes. Now clearly that is really very, very early in the days of a podcast and we have not quite to a hundred episodes just yet. However if I continue to publish one episode per week, this time next year we will in fact be pretty darn close. Certainly not at this point have we caught up Pat Flynn and his Smart Passive Income podcast which has in fact just past 100 episodes but we’re certainly making steps in the right direction.

So what’s coming up on our one-third of the way to a century of episodes’ show? The topic we are diving in to today is Google authorship and Google author rank. This is a whole idea that Google are moving towards the scenario where an individual authority on a particular topic will have a bearing on where and how their content appears in the search results. My guest today, Mark Traphagen really is driving a lot of the conversation around this topic and he’s even gotten Google reps like Matt Cutts to divulge a few clues as to whether in fact Google are already using author rank within their search results.

So that’s the topic of today’s conversations, certainly relevant and topical but don’t go anywhere after the interview because of course I have got all of the regular segments that we’re so used to on the show, the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic and the traffic jam jam.

So let me introduce my guest for today, his name as I said is Mark Traphagen. He’s a senior director at Stone Temple Consulting along with Eric Enger. He’s a top 3000 user on Google+ and he speaks all around the world on the topic of Google Authorship, Google+ and Google Author Rank. And apart from these credits that clearly show that Mark is an absolute authority on these topics as you’re about to find out on this interview, Mark is just a super, super nice guy so let’s now get in to the interview- it’s the topic of authorship, author rank and it’s with Mark Traphagen.

James: Hello and welcome listeners to the interview section of episode 33 and welcome to my guest expert and co-host for the show, Mark Traphagen. Mark, welcome to Traffic Jam.

Mark: James, thank you so much for having me. I am so glad to be here and looking forward to our conversation.

James: Absolutely! Well, I have asked you on the show because you know a fair bit about the current hot topic on the search and social web and that’s Google Authorship. Let’s open up with a quick explanation of what authorship is and how you happened to be so involved with it.

Mark: Sure, well basically authorship is a program that Google put forth to enable content creators to connect their content from anywhere in the world with a social profile, in this case, their Google+ profile since obviously Google owns that, indicating to Google that this is my content and allowing Google to first of all track that and have that visibility and see this is where I publish and this is what I published. The most immediate manifestation of that to most people are familiar with and have seen even if they don’t know what it is is seeing an author’s profile photo next to content in search. I am sure by now everyone in your audience has seen that. Google authorship is generally how that is created or how that is generated. And then it’s just a matter of connecting, putting on your Google+ profile in a section called contributor tool in the links section, all the domains in which you publish content under your own name, and then from those domains linking back to those Google+ profiles and establishing that Google profile connection.

James: Got it! So apart from the personal branding effect and the fact that you may or may not get stopped by complete strangers in hotel lobbies exclaiming you’re in my search results which I read happened to you, Mark. What are the benefits of subscribing to Google Authorship?

Mark: Number one that people should be looking is for is that personal branding is if you write consistently about topics that are going to be of interest to your target audience, when they search in Google search, as that content begins to perform well, it comes up again and again with your name and your picture attached to it and I think this has a psychological effect on people over time. They begin to recognize you and think of you as an authority in that field. Psychologically again, it may not be conscious and it says Google is promoting this author and Google wants this impression to go forth. On a more prosaic level, it has been demonstrated in many studies not surprisingly that having your author photo next to your content increases the click through rate on that content in search. People’s eyes are drawn to a face and they also probably have a psychological connection that oh this is content by a real person. Everything else on that search page might be a real person but this one is verified. They’re going to click on it first even if it is further down the page and then finally there is the power of Google personalized search. Google is making it more and more likely that more people are searching and using the web while logged in to Google. The bigger your Google network, the more influence you have and the more likely your content is to show up especially by people who follow you and that have a connection to you, whether it is Google+, Gmail, or Gchat, all the various ways that they can be connected to you. Your content when they do relevant searches in their logged in search is going to be pumped up and promoted to those people. So those are some of the powerful effects that it can have.

James: Yeah, well I think we’ll perhaps dig in to the whole topic of how to build up your network on Google+ perhaps a little later but I do want to ask you about a particular topic that I was not actually aware of until I did some kind of research for our interview and that’s that if you click through on a search result for a particular author and then stay on that content for 2 minutes or more, if you click back to the search results, you’ll actually be offered more content by that author. Is that correct?

Mark: Well, actually that was a nice little feature that came and went, at least here in the United States. It was around for about a year, it was very nice but is just no longer the case. It’s just something that Google tested and for whatever reason did away with, maybe not enough people making use of it or they did not see enough people clicking on the more results when they do that, however, it is still the case that if people click on your name in the search results, they get a dedicated search of just your content ranked by relevancy to whatever their first query was. That’s kind of cool! But going back to it for a moment that even though that feature that you mentioned deprecated, it gave us a key insight of the way that Google is looking in to these things. They are probably the first real world proof we have of something that a lot of people have talked about and that is that Google watches what people do when they click through to content in search and specifically do people come back to search and then click on something else, that would seem to indicate that they did not find what they are looking for in their first click. So this is a real tangible evidence that they’re measuring that and particularly for authors, we begin to talk about the idea that maybe Google wants to evaluate authors based on how people respond to their content, that could be one measure, when people click through, do they spend some time on your site, on your content? Do they click through and say, oh this is junk and come right back?

James: Yeah and this is the whole concept of pogo sticking right? Someone clicks on the result, lands on a page, and then, oops, this is not what I am looking for, hit the back button, and then find something else that perhaps matches what they’re looking for a little bit better.

Mark: Exactly!

James: Let’s talk next about the concept of author rank. Is it in existence already? Fact or fiction?

Mark: Well, the answer is – sort of.

James: Love it! An SEO answer.

Mark: Exactly, and what I mean by that is first of all the concept of author rank – let’s be clear first of all that the word phrase author rank is a made up term, that is a term that has been made up by the general SEO community. It’s not a term that Google has used specifically but it’s based in some Google ideas going back to a series of patents called the agent rank patents that Google filed years ago where they talked about a system of being able to identify various agents, one of which would be able to relate them in to their content and then watch signals and evaluate that author either overall or perhaps even topically like the things the author writes about and give that author a score based on that content and based on how people respond to it and engage with it and that score can then be used to potentially boost search rankings where that would be merited. Ever since that has been released and especially with the introduction of Google+ and the introduction of Google authorship right about the same time, many people expected to see some kind of manifestation of author rank but we’ve been waiting for it and we haven’t seen any conclusive evidence that it is a direct ranking signal yet and in fact we’ve had some Google representatives explicitly state that authorship is not at this present time a direct ranking factor and I want to emphasize direct because that means it’s not a one to one correspondence. If you have a good author score that your content is automatically just by that going to rank better. But I am beginning to think that it could already actually be in use as a confirmatory type of signal would be one way, meaning that other signals around your content are good which the things that normally cause it to rank are. Your author value, your author score, it may be looked at as one more thing that confirms to Google, they should be trusted, they should rank a little higher. One more way in which your author quality is being used is a qualifying content. This we know – two areas where that’s been revealed, one is in the in-depth articles in search. This is something you’ll see on selected queries where Google will provide a box in the search results that shows three articles that go a little bit more depth in to the topic. So how do they select those? The main way seem to be on the basis of publisher so in other words from very well-known and trusted like New York Times, Atlantic Magazine, etc. However they have said you should connect authorship to your content because authorship will be one factor that they will use and recently Matt Cutts confirmed that in a tweet reply to me that it’s indeed something that they look at, the quality of an author’s content as a qualifier for that and then quickly the other place where I know it is being used is in whether you get that author showing up next to your content. Google recently tightened up on that and one of the factors that comes in to play on that is the overall quality of the content. Now what we don’t know is exactly what Google means by quality but the fact of the matter is that they are at least in the beginning being able to look at it and say who are the trusted authors out there and at least use that to qualify them for certain search features if not directly for ranking at this point.

James: Yeah! Well this kind of ties in nicely with the statement that David Amerland made on Traffic Jam episode 30 where he said he knew of cases where author rank was affecting search and the example that he gave was that established authors could rank quickly very well but if there was no supporting signals that kind of confirmed that the content was good, they’d very quickly drop back down the ranks. Is this kind of what you mean by confirmatory signals?

Mark: Yes, I think maybe sometimes Google may be using it, I want to stress may to kind of quickly – I don’t have a term for this yet, but to test something. If I can share an anecdotal example very quickly that we saw recently. There was someone who had relatively obscure blog who managed to get a print interview with Rand Fishkin who’s a very well-known authority figure in the SEO world and he scored this interview, put it up about a year ago, it just did not, for whatever reason – probably because his blog was so unknown, did not get much traffic, did not get many links, did not get much attention, and it was languishing on page 2 of the search results for a search on interview with Rand Fishkin. Then in a little experiment back in January, with Rand’s cooperation, he asked Rand to add his site to Rand’s contributor to links and Google+ profile and sure enough, because Rand’s name is prominent of course in the interview page, within days, the article suddenly popped up to the top of Google. It remained there most likely because it got a lot of attention because Rand promoting that happening, it got on several websites, and it started getting links and so it started to show the signals that Google wanted to see so it’s staying on the top ranking. But that’s one piece of evidence and we’re seeing others that Google’s saying when a trusted author is connected with a piece of content that they may at least test ranking that higher. They may throw it up and see what happens. It’s like you’re throwing a spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks.

James: Yeah, and again a bit of an SEO answer there, I guess it could be or it could not be on that case based on what else is happening around at that site at that time, right?

Mark: Right. And we have to give that answer because it’s something that is very, very difficult to really test scientifically for. To test something and say this is that, this is the author rank, you’d have to be able to isolate that from all the other effects that Google uses to influence search rankings and that’s very, very difficult to do.

James: Yeah, and all of these stuff it works in tandem anyway, right? I think one signal on its own in itself probably does not mean too much unless it is supported by other stuff that’s happening so I guess this is very difficult and I guess this is a topic Mark, I mean SEOs they tend to get quite granular with all of these stuff and look for tactics that kind of cheat the system and influence rank where other things might not. I think we kind of have to get away from that idea anyway, right?

Mark: Oh, absolutely! And you mentioned you’ve had David Amerland on the show, he’s a good friend of mine and that’s the direction that he’s telling us we need to go and leading us that as we come in to the world of semantic search, trying to gain individual factors has less and less return to it, you have to have a more holistic approach, it’s a lot of things working together, it’s building your real world trust and authority, as David so often says, doing the things that would get you good reputation gets you recommended in the real world which we all live are now the things more and more that are going to be rewarded in search as well.

James: Yeah. So what do we know right now about Google’s ability to rank authors? Because I know for instance that Google’s Matt Cutts said something to the extent of we’re doing a better job at detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a specific space so I guess if I use you as an example Mark, Google might know you as an authority in the realm of Google+ or as I have found out by your show notes before the show that you know how to legally marry couples even if you’re not a professional clergy so they might know that you know a little bit about that as well. What else do we know right now about Google’s understanding of authors themselves?

Mark: That’s a great question. What we don’t know is how granular it is as far as topic body, that’s seem to be where you question is going, at least in part. That is something that theoretically that they’re interested in and as you said, Matt Cutts and others in Google have said, we want to know and we’re trying to get better at knowing when someone is an authority in a particular area so I think that it’s somewhere where they want to go and I think they are going to get better and better at because they are getting better and better at being able to evaluate content, not just by keywords like they use to, but by real language measurements, by the kinds of ways machine learning how to understand language in ways that you and I understand. And being able to understand context and what’s most important in a piece of content so I think we’re going to see more and more of that. Another particular answer is again is coming totally out of my observation, I watch this stuff all the time, it’s not something that I can specifically test for but I think that we’re going to see that, we’re seeing it first in terms of sites, or in Google’s publishers because that’s the low hanging fruit. It’s what Google already does fairly well and they know they are able to do so I think we are seeing more and more topical authority in connection with sites and publishers. But I expect that to begin to leak over in to individuals, authors in this case. And I want to say, again, this is just my opinion, based on observation over years with the way Google does things. I think any boost, if it’s already there or if it’s coming, is going to become first to very well-known authors, the people who have a track record. I don’t think you are going to see much of this happening for smaller authors or people who don’t have much engagement or are well known. They are going to play it safe, they are going to promote people who are pretty much already safe bets as being well known, see how that goes and then slowly over time who are those people that we don’t know are maybe going down in the lower tail that deserve to be boosted more.

James: And we certainly know that this is the direction that are heading in right? I mean I know that I heard from Amit Singhal probably going back a couple of years ago now and the phrasing that he used that Google were trying to bring the sense of offline authority and offline authorship in to the online world and give those people that potentially are authorities in a particular topic some form of preference within search. Would you agree that that’s the case?

Mark: Oh, absolutely! Every indication and we’ve had encouraging signs again and again that this is the direction that Google wants to move in. I’m only conservative about it even though I am a big advocate of this, I have been studying this since it was introduced, following it, testing it, using it. I am conservative in saying oh, it’s here it’s a ranking factor that’s helping everybody because, again, I am a careful observer of Google over the years and I know, here in the United States, I’d like to quote this, there used to be a Neb campaign with the late Orson Wells representing a winery and he said we would serve no line before it’s time and I would like to say Google will serve no search factor before its time. They will take all the time they need to carefully test things, to learn how to make it better, and I believe it is very likely that we are deep in to that author authority testing stage now, but they are not going to throw something quickly in the search results, it’s going to make a mess out of it. And this evaluating content linked to an author’s reputation especially if you are going to talk about it being topical, is incredibly more complex than most people think. So I think Google is going to take its time on this and I think we are going to see this gradually rolled out over the coming years.

James: So when, if anytime you think that author rank could potentially link directly influence search ranking?

Mark: Oh, that’s impossible to say, it’s not giving you the answer you that you want, it sounds like I’m stalling but it really is impossible to say. I recently wrote an article on the Stone Temple Consulting blog, my company’s own blog, called crovadous author rank, people can just search for that, I guarantee you, nobody else has used that title.

James: We’ll have it linked in the show notes also for sure – we’ll make sure that our listeners can find that, it’s a great article.

Mark:  Thank you! Terrific! But in that article I made the point that it’s a like a lot of these kind of things because as you said it so well James, none of these is in isolation, that it is highly likely that this is going to roll out and kind of be infused in to search so gradually that it will be turning up the thermostat a little bit more and a little bit more that it is going to be hard to say that today, author rank started. I think we are just going to see more and more gradual effect over time and just something to watch for but I think that we’ll begin to know at some point, we’ll be able to say that it’s obvious that Google was boosting the top authors on these topics. Whether that will come on a certain day that will be hard to say.

James: Yeah, they have a tendency to sneak this things off on us right? I mean all the change of the algorithms in the hummingbird structure kind of went by and they said they actually changed it a few months back and hadn’t had a damn clue that it had happened but it’s still been done but I am sure this could potentially roll out in the same fashion. Well, let me ask you about potentially activating it because there are some reasons or arguments against why Google might not be ready to use an author rank in actually determining search rank and that might be things like they still don’t know a hundred percent who the author of that piece of content is, you know, not everyone’s subscribed to Google+ so there’s an effort that we should be waiting, how far are we away from these factors not being valid concerns anymore?

Mark: Yeah, I think you just named one of the factors that I would bring up but there are several that made me think again when I tried to explain to people why. Google’s still google. They can do anything and they can do it tomorrow! It’s not so easy and there are some hurdles. One is, as you just mentioned, the relatively low adoption of Google authorship. I think Google had a hope in the beginning that this would just take off and that everybody who writes on the web would want to be associated with this, and while on certain verticals has had a lot of adoption, there’s huge places where it doesn’t. Some of the most prominent authors on the web don’t use it at all. Either because they have not heard of it, they can’t be bothered with it, or they are famous enough that they think they don’t need it. And because of that by the way, we’ve seen for about two years now Google trying to experiment with Google trying to auto attribute authorship which leads to something that you mentioned a moment ago, sometimes, misattributions and that’s another indicator why they want to have more confidence that they can get an author right connected with content whether or not that author is using Google authorship mark up on his or her content another area is the signals around an author’s content. They can certainly see the traditional SEO signals, the link graph and the kind of signals that we all know in the SEO field but the agent rank patterns talk about wanting to be able to measure engagement and that means being able to know who is engaging with the content, not just the author, and when and how they are engaging with it and an increasing amount of that of course takes place on social media and a lot of that social media is not as visible to Google as they would like. Facebook in particular is very walled off to Google. So Google is wanting to know how can we be sure we are getting the right signals around an author’s content. And I think that it is something that they are working on and building.

James: Well let’s tear all of these things down to some practical things for our listeners. First of all, how do we go about getting Google authorship set up? I think you eluded to some of those steps in the intro in terms of assigning your contributor URLs in your Google+ profile. What else do you need to do to get it set?

Mark: Yeah, it can get complicated if you have a large set with multiple authors, not horribly complicated, but a little bit more. But let me just give it up at the simplest level and people can work from there. It is simply a two-way verified connection between Google+ personal profile, and it has to be a personal profile, not a business or brand page and your content on the web and how you make that is by a two-way link. First of all, as I said, if you go to your Google+ profile, you’ll find a section in the links section in your about tab that’s called contributor to. And you don’t have to put every link to every piece of content on there, just a link on the homepage of the domain in which you publish is enough. Then on the content itself, the easiest thing to do is just link back to your Google+ profile. From there, at the bottom of your content, if the place you are publishing will allow it, you can say follow me on Twitter, follow us on Google+ so the Google+ link will link you back with your profile. Not absolutely necessary but best practice is to add a rel equals author attribute to that and if your listeners look up in Google rel=author they’ll find plenty of tutorial and how to build a link with a rel=author markup attribute. But that two way connection fundamentally is what makes it. Your listeners can also google something that’s called structured data testing tool. That’s a tool that Google’s provided but once you think you’ve got it set up you can take the URL and leave your content on the web, put it in this tool and it will tell you if authorship has been set up correctly for you.

James: Fantastic! Well, again those will be linked to within the show notes, I guess that’s step one. Second step is I guess building authority. You’ve got a particularly large following on Google+ and you’ve got a lot of engagement. How would our listeners go about building their own authority so they may start to build up some form of authority with that concept of the author rank?

Mark: First of all I want to emphasize because I think there has been a lot of bad feedback, it is not necessary to be active on to have a huge following on Google+ in order to gain author authority in Google. I don’t think that would hurt, I think it adds to it if you can do it and if you want to be that and it certainly adds the biggest values of building a large network on Google+ is as we mentioned earlier an effect to personalize search where your Google+ content and things that you recommend and share can get bumped up in the personalized searches of people who are connected with your but it’s not necessary to do that. What is even more important is that you are producing the best quality content that you can, that you are posting it on good sites and high authority sites. I think the basic measure for that is if that site will accept anybody’s content right on scene, that’s not a site you want to be on. And I think it is more valuable to be on sites that are very relevant to what you are writing about. So you don’t want to be so much on sites about any topic that comes along. But the more focused the site can be the better that’s going to be the best for you. And then, build up your personal network, not just on Google+ but everywhere. The network that builds an audience for your content. People that care about for what you write. And then when you write it, when you share it, they are going to re-share, they are going to recommend you to other people. I think all those things are the type of things that to be doing at a practical level to begin to build the kind of authority that will get you noticed by Google in the long term.

James: Fantastic! We’ll we’ve got some action steps there so I think that’s the perfect point to kind of wrap things up Mark. Where should our listeners go to find out a little bit more about you?

Mark: I think the number one place is Google+ itself. If you just go to google.com/+marktraphagen that will take you right to me. I am on Twitter also by that name, @marktraphagen and very active there and folks can try to connect with me on LinkedIn as well.

James: Fantastic! So there you go listeners. That’s Mark Traphagen. You’ll get the links to all the resources mentioned by Mark in this week’s show notes go to TrafficJamCast.com and then look for episode 32. Thank you Mark! It’s been an absolute pleasure. You’ve been a real generous gentleman with your time, your expertise and the Traffic Jam community. Thank you!

Mark: James, great interview! I really, really appreciate it. You had wonderful questions, I had a lot of fun!

James: Awesome stuff, thanks Mark!

Mark: Bye, bye now!

This Week’s News in Traffic

So we move on to this week’s news in traffic. We stop first at Social Media examiner who’ve reported on a new feature being added by Twitter and that is Twitter photo tagging. In this new feature you can tag up to 10 people in a photo and still have all 140 characters left to write your tweet. To tag someone in a photo on Twitter you select the photo, select who’s on the photo, type and select the name of the person you want to tag and then when that photo appear in that person’s Twitter feed, they will see the tagged names on the photo itself and then by clicking on the tag they’ll be able to click through to that particular person’s profile. Now this is a pretty basic update, I think it will help connectivity and explorability around Twitter but what I really hope it doesn’t do is build rise to this sort of tagging spam that’s so prevalent on Facebook so I really hope that people on Twitter avoid these tactics I am sure you and I have experienced on Facebook.

On the next item, we actually go to Google+ for a very small update I noticed on my own profile that they’ve added on Google+ today and I have seen they have added this little view count on the profile itself. Having dug a little deeper on this and read an article over at Tech Crunch. Apparently this data shows all of the views of a user’s profile, post, and photos, since October 2012. It has appeared on all profile but it is an optional setting. If you’ve rather not show your total views on your profile you can turn it off. Just go to your profile settings to make that change.

For the third and final story this week, we go to Facebook who have expanded their audience lookalike capabilities. The lookalike capabilities allow advertisers to create lookalikes based on people who have either visited their website, used their mobile apps, or connected to their Facebook pages. Previously, with lookalike, I believe you had to essentially upload an excel file with all of your customers and prospects included and their email addresses. And then what Facebook would then do is match those email addresses with Facebook profiles and then profile those people based on their likes and interests and then suggest other people that would be suitable to target so it’s very much a manual process. With this new capability, Facebook can identify those people through the Facebook conversion tracking pixel, i.e. if you’ve got the conversion tracking pixel installed in your website, anyone that opts in to your email list or buys a product or service from you, Facebook will be able to identify and then suggest other people that might be good to target also within your advertising. I’ve got to say, I think this is a pretty darn cool update that’s certainly going to be a huge amount of capability with this. I think their options are going to be fantastic and I certainly look forward to trying it out myself. According to Facebook, it is already available in the power editor and that’s available worldwide so it should already be available to you. To get started, go to the power editor, click on the audiences tab, then select create new audience and within that you’ll then find lookalike audiences where you’ll be able to access this new feature. To find the links to these stories in full check the show notes for episode 33 at TrafficJamCast.com.

One review over at Stitcher.com and it’s from N Lauper who rated the show 5 stars and then goes on to say – doing business online, this is a must listen. James and his guest continue to crush it with awesome actionable content week in and week out. If you’d like more traffic in to your website, and who wouldn’t, this is the show for you. As always, I am always open and very willing to receive more feedback and comments for the show, so usual places, Stitcher.com or iTunes.com or on the show page of the episode itself over at TrafficJamCast.com.

One Minute Traffic Tip

When most people talk about guest blogging, they talk about it in relation to making content for other people’s websites so you can reach other people’s audiences. This is okay but by creating content for someone else’s website, you’re building their asset and not your own. Consider flipping this equation completely on its head and accepting guest contributions to your own site. If you filter your contributors can carefully, only accepting guest post by writers who are real authorities in your market and who have a very large audience, you’ll get the benefits of their traffic when they promote their content on your site to their audience and you’ll get links to their established website, subsequently improving your SEO. All of these happens while they are adding content to your site and building your asset and not their own.

Thank you for listening in to episode #33 of Traffic Jam. I will of course be back in about seven days from now with episode 34 where I will be interviewing Eric Enger who is in fact Mark Traphagen’s colleague in Stone Temple consulting and we’re going to be having a chat about inbound marketing and SEO. So all that to look forward to next week. Remember to visit Traffic Jam Cast to join the discussion on Episode 33 and to get all of the links and resources mentioned in today’s show. You can also visit veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more traffic faster from the search engines. We end this week’s show with the track called This Year by the curiously named band, The Mountain Goats. Enjoy!