The Google Authorship Challenge – Get Highlighted!

Written By: Adam Dince

The Authorship Challenge: 

I’d like to invite all to participate in the “Google Authorship Challenge”.  Be the first to have Google author highlights appear for your personal blog/Website within Google organic search results and I will provide a write-up of your blog/product/service and publish it on AdamDince.com.  To be fair, only participants who have not yet implemented authorship code are eligible to win.  Not only is this a chance to challenge yourself, it’s also an opportunity to take your personal branding to the next level!

If you’re not familiar with Google Authorship, I’ve provided a summary below the contest information.  Because this is a challenge/competition, I’m not providing a step-by-step “how-to” instruction, however please find links to valuable resources at the bottom of this post.

How Does The Competition Work?

If you’d like to participate:

1. Email me your name and Website URL – adamdince at gmail dot com
2. I will check your site to make its not already set-up to receive Google Authorship highlights
3. Once I’ve verified eligibility, you will receive a confirmation email that gets you started
4. As soon as your organic search results highlight you as the author, send another email to me with the Google query that returned the highlighted result
5. The first contestant that sends me an email with a highlighted result wins

Note: Don’t be discouraged if it takes time to see your author highlights appear in search results.  It took me over four months of persistence to get mine to render.

What Is Google Authorship?

Have you ever wondered why some Google search results have an image of the author next to them and others don’t?  It’s called Google Authorship, and its Google’s attempt to reward high-quality content by highlighting authors within its search results.

“Authorship is a great way to identify and highlight high-quality content,” Google Product Manager Sagar Kamdar said in a company blog post. “Plus, the web is centered around people. People discovering content on the web often want to learn more about its author, see other content by that author, and even interact with the author.”  http://mashable.com/2011/06/28/google-authors-search/

Why Is Google Authorship Important?

There are many benefits of having an author highlighted search result.  Authorship will help your organic search result to:

• Stand Out:  Users looking for content will have more stimulus attracting them to your link
• Be More Personal:  In business and in pleasure, it’s important to add a personal touch to whatever you’re doing.  That personal touch may be the difference between success and failure.  Authorship is a great way to add your personal touch to your search result listing
• Increase Trust:  Today, everyone’s an “expert” in search marketing and social media. Prove it by showing readers, potential employers/clients that you know how to connect the dots between the two
• Rank Higher:  Highlights encourage click-thru.  A higher click-thru rate in Google search results will lead to higher organic search rankings for your Web pages.  Furthremore, I believe that Google, in the future, will give Websites that have authorship snipppets set-up, preference in organic search results

That being said, there is no reason to not leverage Google’s author highlights.

Does Google Highlight All Authors Who Implement Authorship Snippets?

As of now, Google only rewards highlights to select blogs that it considers high-quality and deserving. At some point, Google may make author highlights more prevalent.

Here Are Some Valuable Resources To Help You Get Started:

1. Google’s official blog post on author highlights
2. Google’s instruction on authorship markup
3. Google’s introduction to Schema.org
4. Test your rich snippets to make sure your authorship highlights will eventually render in Google search results

Good luck everyone and please keep me posted on your authorship journey.