Google announced the support of the Authorship markup. Google explained:
Today we're beginning to support authorship markup - a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We're experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.
Google said clearly, "we may look at it as a signal to help us determine the relevance of that page to a user's query."
How does it work?
- A content page can be any piece of content with an author: a news article, blog post, recipe, review, short story
- An author page is a page about a specific author. For example, a news site might feature an author page for each of its contributors. The author page should be on the same domain as the content page.
To identify the author of an article or page, include a link to an author page on your domain and add rel="author" to that link, like this: "Written by Matt Cutts.
Say that Matt is a frequent contributor to http://example.com. Here’s a link from his http://example.com author page to the page he maintains on http://mattcutts.com:
In turn, Matt's profile on http://mattcutts.com points back to his author page on http://example.com, like this:
Matt has also written lots of articles for the Foo Times.
The reciprocal rel="me" links tell Google that the profiles at http://mattcutts.com and http://example.com/contributors/mattcutts represent the same person.
Matt Cutts tweeted saying, "one big potential win is that web could move from disjointed web pages to learning about great authors on the web."
Google News does let you search by author. For example, find some of my stories across this site and Search Engine Land on Google News.
Will it work the same or better? Time will tell.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.
