SEO benefits hidden in Google Authorship – links, links, and links!
Google confirms hidden SEO benefit of authorship: bonus links after a clicking the back button
Digging into useful SEO information out there for you readers is one of my favorite things to do, and in doing so, I stumbled upon something that will benefit anyone who actively stays on top of Google trends. Today, I stumbled upon an article that confirmed the hidden SEO benefits of Google Authorship.
What is this SEO benefit?
According to Search Engine Land’s Matt McGee:
If a user returns to the search results after reading an author-tagged search result for a certain period of time, Google will add three additional links to similar articles from the same author below the originally clicked link.
Really??!! What exactly does this mean and how does this happen?
If you do a Google search and pick a result that has an author rich snippet associated with the article, read the article for a short period of time and click the back button, Google will then include “More by (author)” along with three links to other articles.
You read that correctly, Google will build you back links! You can actually do this yourself by reading your own articles as well and add this to your daily SEO routine. Search for your posts, click and read, then hit the back button. Although, you can’t do this with haste as Google is measuring time-on-site to determine if a reader enjoys the content. There is no specific information out there on how much time a user needs to spend on a post, but tests out there on the Internet determined a minimum of 2 minutes.
Google has confirmed the following:
If a user visits an article by an author and it seems like they’d be interested in finding more articles by this author, when they click the “Back” button to return to the results page, we’ll show more results by that author.
This is all very good news for us bloggers and SEO professionals out there! Link building is a challenge since Google clamped down on this past year with algorithm updates. Too many links too quick will get you penalized! This is a safe and Orangehat way– it’s also Google approved!
To learn how to use Author Rich Snippets for SEO, read my article about how to set it up so you too can take advantage of this hidden SEO feature.
Example of Authorship Snippet
Read more SEO tips and tricks by Ryan Neal