Google Is Worried About Your Reputation…
Let me talk to you about “Author Rank” for a few…
It’s one of the ways the face of SEO has dramatically shifted in the last 12 months.
What Google had admitted to is that WHO you are matters in SEO. Google is actively monitoring how much the blog posts YOU produce are shared, tweeted, linked on Facebook Fan Pages, etc. Google knows that if the internet as a whole isn’t listening to you and isn’t sharing your sites, it’s probably not great work. And if it’s not great work, it probably doesn’t deserve to be ranked highly in Google and get all that free SEO traffic.
That’s the situation in a nutshell. This kind of outside engagement via social media – and who YOU and YOUR blog are (and Google’s interpretation of your popularity in the marketplace) that are gonna matter more and more in 2012.
I’m super excited about these changes because it means that big corporate brands or the people with the biggest link building budgets won’t necessarily be the automatic winners in the top 10 of the SERPs.
Who’s going to win are the folks doing work that matters – the folks creating something worth sharing.
It’s where I’ve focused my 2012 business plan and where I hope you will too. I sincerely believe that if you don’t, your sites will be left behind, an ancient (in internet years, anyway!) but useless relic.
This idea – really putting your reputation (which Google is looking at) on the line and making a difference in your niche – is a lot scarier than buying some PLR articles, installing WordPress and adding Adsense to the mix. It’s dangerous. You could fail. It might be embarrassing.
But it’s deeply inspiring too.
If the idea of creating a legacy with your business resonates with you, take a look at the movement behind this page.
Invigorating, isn’t it?
I’m a big fan of the recent changes Google has been announcing. The idea of trying to show current, time sensitive content in results; of including people’s personal likes in results and of trying to derank sites that are full of affiliate ads above the fold.
The idea that content can be given authority based on the authority of the author is good. Of course, it’s open to abuse because now there will no doubt be armies of people creating profiles on all kinds of sites and then posting under these profiles.