Blogging and the new laws - ala Google.

Google however has made some changes recently in how they would like this done so it’s imperative that you learn this little trick so that, while others get penalized, you can increase your search ranking. Basically it’s meant so that the “blog-bots” don’t just farm content, driving the blog without anyone at the wheel or even worse, trying to pass the valuable post as their own.

Google does not mind if you mine for blog content as long as you have a reference backlink “anchor text” that recognizes the author. Jon Jantsch and Matt Cutts did a great job outlining how to go about this so that the Google spider will recognize it.

In an effort to place more emphasis on the original authors of content and perhaps further eliminate duplicate content, Google has begun focusing on an anchor text attribute – rel=”author”. For those that don’t know, to create an anchor text link you can just use your mouse to highlight a word or phrase, right click, select “hyperlink” and add a site address. From that moment on, clicking on that word or phrase will send the reader directly to the site address you specified.

Now, an “anchor text attribute” is just more information contained in the HMTL code of a link. In this case the use of the author attribute in conjunction with content, such as a blog post, signals search spiders that this is the original author.

So a link to my about us page with attribute would look like this:
a href="http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/about/" rel="author"John Jantsch

The reward for using this attribute has started showing up in search results with the image of the author placed to the right of the results in a growing number of instances. The Google author program kicked off formally a while back with a limited number of well-know bloggers and journalists and is slowly rolling out to others. (Here’s the official Google announcement)

The images Google is showing next to the selected articles are drawn from Google Plus profiles and link back to the author’s profile page. Some people have noted, incorrectly that this is a further extension of active Google+ users into the search results. The author program was actually in place prior to Google Plus and drew originally on the old Google personal profiles. In fact, some of the higher profile authors chosen have very limited Google+ activity.