A couple of months ago we posted about authorship markup and what it means to B2Bs. When you are searching online for something, a particular author can be attributed to their published content. The title of the content shows up, along with the link, date, and meta description just like the other search results but what makes it stand out is the inclusion of the author’s name and photo.

A person is more likely to end up clicking on a search result that has an image, especially if they recognize the person. Not only will this attract more people to click on the results it will also give that author more authority compared to the other results on that page.

New and Improved Look!

Authorship just got better.

We had given instructions in the previous post about how to go about implementing authorship markup with your content. But Google just made this so much easier for us to link ourselves to the content that we publish around the web.

The idea behind simplifying this process is that, in many cases, our email address is associated with the content that gets published. What Google did was allow you to verify your email address in your Google+ profile so that any content you write that is also associated with that email address gets attributed back to you as the author. Genius! (And so much easier/quicker than before!)

Check out this blog posted by Google that explains step-by-step how to set up authorship using just your email. In addition to simplifying the process they also explained that they have improved the look of your authorship. Now, the authorship includes your Circle Count, an option to “Add to Circles,” and Comments.

These updates will eventually change the way we search. We will be more likely to interact with content published by someone we recognize or that a friend has recommended. The additional author information makes us feel that the content is more reputable than the others which makes us value and trust that content over other content that isn’t attributed to the author.