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Is Authorship Dead? Or is Google Just Ramping Up? – Making Sure Authorship is Setup Correctly

It seems like it’s been awhile since anything significant in the way of authorship and search rankings has been announced but, don’t let that fool you. There is definitely a correlation, and it’s getting stronger. I’ve been saying since the beginning that Google+ was the new Google. And there is no way we can avoid it. And now, more than ever, this is true.

When authorship first came out we (as Adster) were feeling adventurous. As pioneers we set out boldly. With no guidelines really set at first we went for it, and ended up having authorship pointing to a personal. Way to go guys. No matter, though as we plowed on confident of our expeditions success. For a while, our search rankings increased, and great celebrations were had. They then fluctuated for a while and then gradually went down. Now I’m not saying this is the only contributing factor, however this was one of the only things that we had changed.

At that point we weren’t exactly sure what went wrong and so we left it, however this summer Google finally posted some updated guidelines on how authorship should be implemented.

And I began the process of making sure everything was in order.

I’m still tweaking to make sure things work, however I figured I might as well go through some basic things to make sure you’re not getting dinged for not following best practice.

Authorship

Step One: Consolodation and Cleanup

Make sure authorship is removed for all pages except for posts or in the case of using rel=”author” to point to staff pages, the staff pages themselves need to have authorship. If you are using a cms that dynamically generates content, and has a header file, you can just make sure that if you do have a rel=”author” link set here. 

Step Two: Double Check

Double check it all and document. You need to know how these changes affect you, trying to get it right the first time is the ultimate goal however documenting it as an annotation say in Google Analytics, lets you notice if there are any direct consequences of the changes you have made.

Step Three: Chill Out

Sit back and wait. These changes will more than likely not show up instantly. Keep monitoring your Google Search results, specifically your blog paces.

Keep in mind this is just one of my typical adventures, and there’s still some issues I have to sort out, and questions that need to be answered but follow these steps from the beginning and you’ll  be well on your way to success.