TheBizcoachBlog

How To Take The Right Steps So That The Google Spider Doesn’t Crawl & Penalize Your Blog Posts

We’ve talked about how to easily get valuable content on your blog before (see post: The Traffic Getting Strategy Of Inserting Yourself Into The Traffic Loop) which details finding great applicable content, posting a summary with a backlink-kick back to the original author to give him some traffic juice.

Google however has made some changes recently in how they would like this done so it’s  imperative that you learn this little trick so that, while others get penalized, you can increase your search ranking.  Basically it’s meant so that the “blog-bots” don’t just farm content, driving the blog without anyone at the wheel or even worse, trying to pass the valuable post as their own.

Google does not mind if you mine for blog content as long as you have a reference backlink “anchor text” that recognizes the author.  Jon Jantsch and Matt Cutts did a great job outlining how to go about this so that the Google spider will recognize it.

In an effort to place more emphasis on the original authors of content and perhaps further eliminate duplicate content, Google has begun focusing on an anchor text attribute – rel=”author”.  For those that don’t know, to create an anchor text link you can just use your mouse to highlight a word or phrase, right click, select “hyperlink” and add a site address.  From that moment on, clicking on that word or phrase will send the reader directly to the site address you specified.

Now, an “anchor text attribute” is just more information contained in the HMTL code of a link. In this case the use of the author attribute in conjunction with content, such as a blog post, signals search spiders that this is the original author.

So a link to my about us page with attribute would look like this:
a href="http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/about/" rel="author"John Jantsch

The reward for using this attribute has started showing up in search results with the image of the author placed to the right of the results in a growing number of instances. The Google author program kicked off formally a while back with a limited number of well-know bloggers and journalists and is slowly rolling out to others. (Here’s the official Google announcement)

The images Google is showing next to the selected articles are drawn from Google Plus profiles and link back to the author’s profile page. Some people have noted, incorrectly that this is a further extension of active Google+ users into the search results. The author program was actually in place prior to Google Plus and drew originally on the old Google personal profiles. In fact, some of the higher profile authors chosen have very limited Google+ activity.

Going forward a Google+ account and profile will be part of the deal for those that want to have their images included on original content, but use of the rel=”author” attribute in a very specific fashion is what will ultimately get your content chosen.

The video below, featuring Google spokesperson Matt Cutts, outlines the path Google hopes you’ll take to include the rel=author attribute.

Basically here are the steps:

• You need to have a link on every page of content that points to the author’s about me page, on the same domain, using the author attribute in the link.
• The author’s about me page should also point to their Google+ profile.
• To close the loop, the author’s Google+ profile should point to the author’s about me page.

Make certain to take these steps moving forward and I encourage you to go back and add those author anchor text links to past posts if you did not previously do so.

Patrick “Biz Coach” Daugherty

“You DONT have to change who you are to be successful but instead, make a commitment to discover & express more of who you’re truly meant to be! Believe me, there are people who desperately need what you’re holding back. Free yourself to celebrate that & let yourself shine obnoxiously!”

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