AuthorRank: A Case For Less Anonymity

Recently, there has been a big uproar concerning anonymity on the internet. This time, it was the financial world that was involved when hedge fund manager David Einhorn suspected an anonymous Internet blogger breached their fiduciary duty by disclosing his fund’s purchasing of a new asset. The incident sparked all kinds of reporters and others to freshen up their old defenses and attacks on anonymity, and all eyes turned to the mammoth lawsuit that Einhorn’s lawyers put forth against the blogger’s website, which steadfastly defended its right to use anonymous authors. Anyone familiar with the search engine optimization struggles over the last few years will understand this situation all too well. That’s because Google has been waging its own war against anonymity when it comes to internet authorship and AuthorRank. For Google, AuthorRank is another way to strengthen their grip on the world of search and to weed out automatically produced or anonymous content. AuthorRank does this for Google in various ways, but first and foremost is how social signals factor into AuthorRank. This starts with none other than Google Plus. While the search behemoth’s social network was being dismissively being labeled as the latest social media failure for the search giant, the California-based company was busy hatching a strategy that would make Google Plus relevant to businesses. With AuthorRank, they seemingly validated this strategy, as Google Plus “+1”’s and client engagement are reportedly some of the main components in factoring AuthorRank. After Google’s proprietary network, AuthorRank also factors in the amount of other social signals an interaction a given article or author generates. All this helps the AuthorRank algorithm –and thus, Google—with determining the strength of content created by a given author. AuthorRank factors this by parsing the social signals from an author’s article and combining those measurements with other facets in order to correctly rank authors by the quality of their content. For businesses, this means one thing: trusting the experienced professionals who are dedicated to creating the best content for your venture. The more tailored to your individual business this content is, the more social signals it will garner, and the better your business’ AuthorRank will be. As any search engine optimization professional can tell you, Google’s strategies and efforts not only move the market, but define it. AuthorRank Is no different. AuthorRank represents an important change you must be aware of and act on now.