Is Author Authority a Google Ranking Factor?

Assume you have a small medical issue. Perhaps your jaw clicks noisily behind your molars every time you eat. It’s not painful, but it’s uncomfortable. To solve this vexing situation, you resort to the internet’s all-purpose information library: Google. As you go through the search engine results, which do you believe is more trustworthy: the page written by an ear, nose, and throat specialist with 10 years of medical expertise or the one published by a WordPress blog owner? It is a no-brainer. For you as a user author authority matters. This is not to argue that the WordPress blogger’s page does not include accurate information; it does. Still, he’s unlikely to be more knowledgeable about your condition than a healthcare practitioner with a medical degree, five years of residency training, and a decade of field experience. It is a reality that credibility is important. This has never been more true than now when disinformation abounds on the internet. While most authors want to assist, there is a lot of material on the internet that is simply dangerous. It makes no difference whether the incorrect information is the result of malice or ignorance. Faulty or outright incorrect content can cause significant harm. As a result, author authority, also known as author rank, is considered throughout the search engine optimization process. Let’s have a look at how this works.

The Claim: Author Authority Has an Impact on Page Rankings

Google stresses E-A-T (The expertise of the creator of the content / The authoritativeness of the creator, the content itself, and the website / The trustworthiness of the creator, the content itself, and the website.)  when considering the overall quality of a webpage and how effectively it answers a search query. Expertise, authority, and dependability. But does this contain the author’s E-A-T? Is it significant that the essay was written by an expert rather than a fresh journalism graduate? The notion of author authority has been around for a long time. And the impact it plays in site rankings has long been a source of contention among SEO professionals and digital marketers.

Author Authority and SERP Ranking as Evidence

Google has never suggested that the creator of an item has any direct control over how that content is ranked. But that doesn’t mean you should disregard it. Google filed a patent for Agent Rank in 2005, an eternity of 17 years ago. It allowed the search engine to rank articles based on reputation, which was intended to help screen out low-quality information. Google verified support for authorship markup with rel=”author” in 2011. Yet, adoption of this tag was delayed. According to a 2014 research, just 30% of authors used this tag, and Google eliminated it the following year. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes stated at the 2016 SMX conference that the firm does not use authorship but has methods in place to determine who generated a piece of content. This appears to be a reference to the function authors play in Google’s Knowledge Graph. If you’re not familiar with the Knowledge Graph, it’s a large library of information and entities (i.e., things or concepts that are singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable). Authors are officially recognized entities by Google; thus the search engine does not know who created the information. Author reputation is important, but don’t confuse it with “expertise” and “authoritarianism.” Google evaluates dependability on a certain issue using competence and authoritativeness. Reputation, on the other hand, is a more subjective assessment based on how readers perceive the author. Search Quality Raters Guidelines are used to teach human raters who evaluate the quality of search engines and occasionally test suggested improvements to search algorithms. According to one of these rules, a low content creator score is enough to award the article a low-quality score. However, Google has said unequivocally that these human-generated evaluations are never used to influence query results. Google submitted a patent for Author Vectors in 2018, which allows it to determine who authored unlabeled information. This is accomplished by assessing writing styles, degrees of competence, and interest in various topics. While the search engine giant has not been explicit about how or why they are utilizing this software to calculate search rankings, it has been clear in promoting the inclusion of author URLs in the article structure. It does not specify where this URL should take readers, although it is most typically used to direct readers to a social network profile or bio page.