Go back in time 10 to 12 months, and many people agreed that the Google author rank movement was nothing more than another silly idea. At the time, it didn’t appear that connecting authors with the content that they published online was that big of a deal.
Despite initial reactions, Google authorship is really beginning to take off. This experiment has grown quite a bit over the past year, now being displayed in roughly one of every five searches.
A SearchMetrics study released last week shows that 17 percent of Google searches included at least one rel=author result on the first 10 pages. Making the results even more impressive is the fact that the study analyzed one million keywords, spanning multiple industries and terms.
Who Benefits?
At first, it was difficult to imagine that anybody would benefit from this change to the search engine results. However, this has been anything but the case. There are two distinct groups of people who benefit from Google authorship:
- Those who are interested in reading content produced by a particular publisher
- The authors themselves
SearchMetrics also released a list of the authors who appeared the most during their study. Believe it or not, one author – Diana Rattray – appeared more than 4,200 times. As you can imagine, this is a huge benefit for both the author as well as anybody who wants to read her content.
If you regularly publish content online, don’t be surprised if you find yourself part of the author rank movement.