The idea of author authority has been around for a while. But how does it affect website rankings? Let’s look more closely. Consider that you are experiencing a minor medical issue. Your jaw may make an audible clicking sound behind your molars each time you eat. Although it isn’t painful, it is uncomfortable. You search that all-purpose information bank, the internet, for a solution to this unpleasant issue.
Which website, written by an ear, nose, and throat doctor with 10 years of medical experience, or the one written by a man who runs a Minecraft blog, do you believe is a more trustworthy source as you browse the search engine results?
It’s a clear decision. That is not to argue that the information on the Minecraft blogger’s page is inaccurate. Even yet, it’s doubtful that he is more knowledgeable about your condition than a healthcare practitioner with a medical degree, five years of residency training, and ten years of relevant experience.
It is certain that credibility counts. And there has never been a time when this is more true than now, when false information is easily accessible online.
And even while the majority of authors truly want to help, there is a lot of information online that is simply dangerous. Whether the incorrect information was intentionally spread or was simply a mistake, it may still be very harmful.
The Claim: Page Rankings Are Influenced by Author Authority
Google places a strong emphasis on the letters E-A-T when evaluating a webpage’s overall quality and how effectively it responds to a search query. That entails knowledge, authority, and reliability.
But does this also contain the author’s E-A-T? Does it matter whether the author of the essay is a seasoned professional as opposed to a new journalism graduate?
The idea of author authority has been around for a while. And SEO specialists and digital marketers have long disagreed over what impact it plays in site rankings.
Let’s look more closely.
Author Authority and SERP Ranking As Proof
Google has never said that the author of an article has any direct impact on rankings. Even so, it doesn’t imply you should disregard it.
There is evidence that the dominant search engine is motivated by author identification.
Google applied for a patent for Agent Rank way back in 2005, which is aeon in SEO years. It allowed the search engine to rank articles by reputation using digital signatures, which was intended to help screen out low-quality information.
Google officially endorsed authorship markup using rel=”author” in 2011. However, there was a delayed uptake of this tag. Only 30% of authors were utilizing this tag, according to a 2014 research, and Google formally discontinued it that same year.
Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, stated during the 2016 SMX conference that while the firm does not use authorship, it does have methods in place to identify the author of a piece of content. This appears to be a reference to the function that writers have in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
If the Knowledge Graph is new to you, it is a vast collection of facts and entities (i.e., things or concepts that are singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable). Google does formally acknowledge authors, even if it does not have a comprehensive list of content producers.
Author reputation is important, but it’s important to avoid confusing reputation with knowledge and authority.
The Search Quality Raters Guidelines, a collection of guiding principles used to instruct human raters who assess the quality of the search engine and occasionally test suggested improvements to search algorithms, decide reputation.
According to one of these rules, a low content creator score is sufficient to assign the work a poor quality score. But Google has always been open about the fact that these ratings are never used to influence search results.
Google submitted a patent for Author Vectors in March 2020, which enables it to determine who produced unlabeled information. By assessing writing styles, degrees of skill, and interest in various topics, it does this.
