Most website managers are familiar with PageRank. Its Googles way of figuring out which web pages are more popular than others. In the eyes of Googles search algorithm, popular equals quality. After all, why would a bunch of people visit a useless website?
Now what if content could be prioritized by the popularity of the author, not the website? Its an interesting possibility. Google calls it Author Rank.
Lets say for example I have a very high Author Rank. When I make a new post, Google knows immediately that this post was written by a popular author. Bump. My article is ranked higher in the SERPs.
The big question is, how do I get that high Author Rank and all of the sweet, sweet, 100% organic traffic that goes with it?
Create Quality Content
I say this a lot. I shouldnt have to say it at all. Create quality content. Not only will this benefit your Author Rank, it benefits every other single aspect of your online life. Everything. Period.
Stick To Your Niche
Theres a reason that I blog within a niche. Actually, there are many, but the biggest one is focus. My content is focused and my expertise is focused. I dont deviate. As long as I stick to my niche, Google will eventually recognize that Im a popular contributor to my niche and I shall be rewarded.
Be Popular In All Social Media
Social media activity is essential. While Google+ is the big one, considering were trying to raise our Google Author Rank, but dont ignore the others. Facebook still controls the lions share of social media traffic, so Author Rank will factor in reputations on it and other social media sites.
Respond To Comments
Many bloggers dont know this, I only discovered it recently, but Google had been factoring in author responses to comments for some time now. Its just never been made public. Its nice to know that responding and interacting with my readers has a huge impact on my Author Rank.
Connect With Other Popular Authors
This one connects to social media, as well as commenting and contributing to other blogs in my niche. The more ways I can connect with other authors, the more well both benefit from Author Rank
Post Your Thoughts On High Pr Blogs
Many consider guest posting to be the holy grail of traffic generation. While I dont count myself among them, I do know that guest posts, especially ones on high PR sites, are gold when it comes to building the popularity of my site, and now my Author Rank.
Share Content Regularly.
Update. Update. Update. Then share your updates. Fresh new content is the key to a successful blog. Sharing that content will increase traffic to your site and bump your author rank at the same time.
With Google Author Rank becoming more important in the ranking of search results, wed all do well to follow these few tips, and any other we come across, and boost up our rank as high as we can. Well benefit from the effort, and our fellow bloggers that connect with us will also reap the rewards.
An extract from Official Google Patent should complement the statements made in the above write up.
"if the blogger has a large reputational score due to the agent having an established reputation for provided accurate reviews, the rank of the referenced content can be raised accordingly."
-- Google Agent Rank Patent Filing
About Author Rank
I have enjoyed the following references about Author Rank.
Hey Brian,
It looks like this post doesn’t have a ?rel=author back to your Google+ profile. 😉
Shockley
Hi Shockley,
Thanks for the note.
I have added the ?rel=author in my G+ profile.
– Brian Taylor
Good advice, I write about a variety of topics and that isn’t likely to ever change. Do you have any tools that measure Author Rank?
Gaining a high Author Rank by creating quality content on an ongoing basis is what we all need to be doing then?
@Hazel: That is a good start. However it is important to share, like and comment the content on social networks, and get others to do the same. Also you have to share, comment and like content that has the same topic as you. You could say, that you should interact more with your “enemies” to help yourself.
Great ideas how to build author rank. However, there is one thing we should have in mind. Author rank is not officially released yet, and there is no evidence that it works yet. So you cannot calculate author rank right now. And no one can say exactly what it takes to build author rank. We can only guess.
I have also posted some of my ideas, some of them are the same as yours. If you are interested, you can find the post here: http://webmaster-land.com/how-to-build-you-author-rank/.
Each page has a working rel=”author” mark up that links from the site to Google+ and we’ve also added the website link in the Contributor section of Google+ for each user as well