Co-Author Rank: Centering Rankings on the Best of the Web

AuthorRank has been the talk of the town. It’s gotten the attention of all SEOs from content creators, all the way to linkbuilders. Google Authorship is here to stay and has populated the search engines with faces of old and new writers who have been evangelized to AuthorRank believers. Here’s the thing, can there be such a thing as Co-AuthorRank?

A Little Background

Google is trying make search results more relevant. Afterall, that’s the reason why they’re the number 1 search engine today. The short story is: In light of all the crap that’s going around in the internet today, they figured that real authors would make real content. And so AuthorRank was born.

AuthorRank is basically a metric that Google uses based on your recorded authorship in its database to help verify your rankings. To break it down, it is assumed that Google AuthorRank helps verify your PageRank score. Here’s my post on how to set up your Google Authorship and how it affects your SEO.

Note: I was supposed to write on this a while back. I was just waiting for that smack-down case study that would help prove a point in the possibility of Co-AuthorRank. It already came in the form of Jeffalytics’ post about Why You Need to Establish Yourself as an Authority on Google+. The data-driven case studies he made on Google+ were so powerful that if you didn’t have a Google+ account, you’d immediately sign up for one.

Somehow Overlooked

Co-AuthorRank is not something new. AJ Kohn already talked about Google citing multi-author pages in their rich snippets tool. However, Google’s way of detecting the Authorship snippet is not yet as polished. They try to gather a post’s Authorship by using the post’s crawled by-line.

If you noticed, there’s 2 extracted author names in the picture: Matt McGee and Step Guide. Who the heck is Step Guide?

It turns out that “Step Guide” came from this:

So you see, Google ain’t perfect. But hey, at least they DO TRY to index who the authors are.

In the Real World

It happens. Sometimes an article is written by just one person, sometimes it’s two. In any case, it’s not really uncommon to read an article by 2 or more authors. You could say that sometimes the more authors you have, the better.

•  More data
•  Flexible writing voice
•  Conversational tone
•  Better editing
•  Etc.

Given that it doesn’t always mean the more authors, the better the article, but two all-star authors who can work together? Say Dr. Pete and Brian Clark?

You see Jason Mraz and James Morrison singing a duet.

Why can’t we?

(If you wanted to know the title of the song, it’s “Details in the Fabric”)

Leveraging on Authority

Hypothetically speaking, getting a post with an author who has a supposedly higher AuthorRank , can mean a quick dab in that person’s authority – increasing yours. (Disclaimer: there’s no real, automated, concrete way to measure AuthorRank yet aside from the quality and quantity of his/her posts – which takes a really long time to go through)

2 Quick Wins:

1. You get to publish a great post from an authoritative co-author
2. You get that post socially shared by that co-author

 

The Experiment – Who wants to be my Co-Author?

I’ve been wanting to do this but I haven’t had the chance to do so yet. Here’s what I have in mind:

• Duo post case study with shared/compared data
• Interview going back and forth with questions to and from both authors
• Etc.

Requirements:

1. Put SEO Hacker in your ‘Contributor To’ in your Google Plus Profile
2. Answer Comments on our Co-Authored post

I’ll be screening all interested Co-Authors. If you’re interested in Co-Authoring with me, please contact me here.

Again, this is just a Possibility

Google is trying to feed us more relevance in their SERPs and they implemented AuthorRank which had its run of success in increasing overall quality of Search results. Will implementing Co-AuthorRank make the results any better? Tell me your thoughts in the comments section below.