“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
Eric Schmidt in his upcoming book The New Digital Age
I recently launched a new blog, website and identity in order to realize my long-term goal of publishing more in-depth thought leadership in the world of digital marketing. For years I have been a “consumer” of great content from thought leaders across the marketing spectrum (SEOmoz being a key resource), but I have done little to elevate the conversation.
That changed in September (actually August 31, 2012) when I decided to develop a persona (Jeffalytics), register a brand new domain name and launch a new website at www.jeffalytics.com. The domain name was available and had never been owned previously, so I purchased it from GoDaddy for two years.
In September I selected a template, developed a modest site with a handful of content pages, and planned to post long-form content at least once a week in order to climb the long road to readership. I had little to no expectations for the site to receive traffic from search engines or natural visitors beyond my personal network of awesome people in Minnesota.
It didn’t take long to gain a small victory for the blog, when a blog post was tweeted by the Google Analytics twitter account and to their ~150k followers.
This helped bring in new visitors to the site that previously had none, but I was skeptical that it would provide much organic search value in the long run because of Google dissolving their data relationship with Twitter. At the same time, I was very excited to see traffic to my new site and measure the impact of a tweet from an authority account.
The next level of success was found when a post I published in October about SEO Content Strategy. This post was picked up by inbound.org and sparked some good conversation and traffic coming in. Next, I wrote a post on troubleshooting your installation for Google Tag Manager, which received very little social activity at the time. Then something amazing started to happen. I received a tweet from someone half way around the world thanking me for posting tips for Google Tag Manager – my article helped them solve their problem!
While it was exciting that the article achieved its intended purpose, I was also curious to how they found it, so I searched for “Google Tag Manager Troubleshooting” and sure enough, my page was not only visible, but ranked #1 complete with Google+ authorship citations.
Having worked in SEO for years, this was completely unexpected. I did not expect to see any search traffic to the site for several months, and here I was seeing it in the second month. That got me thinking:
Could Google+ Authorship be the key to getting your website indexed? If you are a trusted author, can you avoid a 3-6 month waiting period to see rankings for your new domain?
For this one search term, it appeared that authorship was the key to becoming visible, but what about a more general search term? Would it have the same effect?
The opportunity came to test this postulate at the 2012 Google Analytics Partner Summit, where many announcements were made about the product. I decided to live-blog the keynote speech where Google introduced Universal Analytics, their new measurement protocol that I am very excited about. (On a side note, live-blogging a product announcement keynote is equal parts thrilling and stressful. I highly recommend everyone do it once. The key is to use a camera that is not your phone camera so that you can zoom and focus).
Before the announcement, the term “Universal Analytics” was far from a household name. In fact, there was one worthwhile result for the keyword, and that was from a company appropriately named Universal Analytics.
Here is what you would have seen searching before the big announcement:
Two days after the announcement, the search results for Universal Analytics featured 9 results discussing the new product, including three at the bottom with authors highlighted (note: this screen shot was taken in incognito mode on 10/31/2012. Since then, Google branded results have begun to dominate organic rankings):
Now the first two results are from well-established thought leaders in digital marketing. The last result? My blog that was a day short of its two-month anniversary!
So does this prove that Google+ Authorship Gets You Ranking Faster?
That is a good question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Perhaps a new domain gains trust faster with Google than I imagined? Fortunately, with the integration between Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, we can see an indication of exactly when the site began to see impressions in Google Search results.
You can see that while a few impressions did occur in September and early October, it wasn’t until October 15 that search impressions started to come in at a significant rate. Once this barrier was broken, search results impressions occurred every day of the rest of the month, peaking with the Universal Analytics announcement.
The Organic Search traffic report in Google Analytics told a similar story, with the site receiving a grand total of eight organic search visits before authorship.
Both of these numbers correlate to the time when I enabled Google+ authorship on the website and within my Google+ profile (it was right after I got back from a two-week honeymoon, so I don’t remember the exact date). Interestingly, the site received impressions in search results for a few days before search traffic started coming in.
We see clear evidence that the new website was being indexed, but not ranking until right around the time where I implemented Google+ authorship on the site. This combined with receiving links from having the blog post picked up on Twitter, Google+ and inbound.org forced Google to take notice. But it also raises the question:
What is responsible for the sudden indexation? Is it content? Links? Authorship?
My theory is that implementing Google+ Authorship is what sent a signal to Google that my new website could be trusted, as long as they trust my Google+ account. Especially since I received this email from Google in September.
How else would you explain a brand new blog ranking for terms like SEO Content Strategy? (note again: this screen shot was taken in November of 2012 and this listing has since been pushed lower due to more recently written articles; many with authorship enabled).
Learning Through Google Authorship
Here is what I learned from this experiment:
-
While Google+ may not garner as much engagement as other social networks, it is still extremely important
- Not SEO related, but an observation – Google+ on the iPad is fantastic for following hash tags. If only people would use it!
- The sooner that you connect Google+ authorship to a new domain, the sooner you will be indexed
- A major negative side effect to Google+ authorship is that most of the search traffic coming into your website is listed as (not provided)
- The combination of authorship and inbound links from trusted sources will put your new site one the map
- If you have a WordPress blog, use Yoast’s SEO Plugin before you post anything. It’s a fantastic reality check and reminder to do basic on page SEO and keyword optimization before publishing.
- Rankings may be time sensitive and are not guaranteed to last without further optimization, so continuous optimization is key for long term success.
I am interested in hearing what everyone has to say about their experiences with authorship. Does Google+ Authorship get you trusted faster?
