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Google Tags Content Creators

Posted by samzenpus on from the all-due-credit dept.

bizwriter writes "Google announced that it will support authorship HTML tags, a way to associate Web content with the individuals who create it. Suddenly, search engines know when one person was responsible for a body of work, no matter where content appears on the Web. If Google incorporates this into page relevance and ranking, as it is considering, the result could change the balance of power between those who create and those who publish."

1 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Article Explained by pinkushun · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is made to sound more uncontrolled that it is. This is what really happens:

    The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web.

    This is handy, allowing search engines to find content by a specific author. It's not like Google will automatically decide what content links to which author.

    We can't expect Google to give purely weighted search results based on this either. More like they will keep their existing page rankings, and include this extra author meta-data in specialized searches.

    We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.

    The bnet article seems to over dramatize it, possibly due to a lack of understanding what this means for content creators.

    Or do I also have the wrong idea?