Guest: Jeremy Dearringer – @PapaSlingshot. Jeremy Dearringer (@PapaSlingshot) is a Co-Founder and the Chief Research Officer at Slingshot SEO. @SlingshotSEO is an award-winning and nationally recognized SEO consulting and internet marketing firm. @SlingshotSEO was named “IT Company of the Year” during TechPoint’s MIRA Awards, the premier technology awards program. @PapaSlingshot began his experience with e-commerce shopping sites. He comes to us tonight with 13 years of exp. in search engine optimization and has worked with many Fortune 500 cos.
@PapaSlingshot: I am Chief Research Officer because my partners wanted to keep all the legit C level titles open.
What is author rank and how do you establish & increase it?
Author Rank = what Google, Bing know about YOU via social networks and your digital footprint. Author Rank may influence your content’s rankings or your ability to influence others’ content.
Brand yourself. Use a common username, Gravatar and profile image across social networks. Protect your username across social networks with tools such as http://Knowem.com. Register even if you’re not using accts.
Google may be able to cobble together your track record from the previous 5 years+ of social activity across networks. Google may connect the dots with cookie, user agent data, work and personal email addresses, IP, geographic info.
Klout is a good indicator for your personal brand influence if you’re honest with yourself and haven’t gamed it. Pick a few topics to establish yourself as an expert. Think Google Panda. Are you a one-man content farm?
Great SEOmoz article by @dohertyjf discussing author rank > http://mz.cm/qmTBKl .
Google’s rel=”author” is simply an admission, not a requirement for Google to identify you or your content.
Author Rank continues to further personalize the search experience, also impacts non-personalized results. First admission by Google & Bing that they use social signals for rank http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389 .
@ashbuckles: I’m curious about someone’s ability to increase rank on multiple blogs/subjects vs. a blog with multiple authors.
@PapaSlingshot: There’s no evidence that your ability to increase your AR is hindered/improved by being a lone author or one of many. I think it would be beneficial to be one of many, on both authors and topics. Good neighbor and all that.
@kmullett: Examples of places to use. Namechk.com free, usernamez.com free, claimid.com free, knowem.com paid, and claim.io paid.
@ashbuckles: We agree that core networks change over time right? I see Google+ on your list.
@PapaSlingshot: You’re right about Google+ , I will stick with it through the peaks and valleys in popularity. Get in a build early.
@robdwoods: Had any luck with multi-author sites or one author / many sites yet? I’ve only heard about one to one so far.
@PapaSlingshot: So far, we’ve not tested anything. But I see @dannysullivan all over my SERPs sometimes.
@dohertyjf: I’ve done some testing and have a few tests in the wild. A writeup from last week: bit.ly/oZWneb
What things will cause authors to receive negative rank?
It may take years of effort to build up legitimate author rank, but only moments to severely damage it. Fake personas today may only work for teens and people in witness protection. Can’t fake 5 years of FB history. If you follow, friend, Like or Google+ crap accounts, you’re probably crap. Real humans don’t tweet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Do you integrate with apps intended to game networks? Do you have a Twitter list named teamfollowback? It may never make sense for a real, legitimate author to have 10,000 FB friends or follow as many people on Twitter. You may end up being more trustworthy to search engines if you have 150 – 400 FB friends. You’re not an outlier.
I really like to follow @JasonFalls @jaybaer and @kyleplacy for social media advice.
@dohertyjf: What about scheduled tweets then?
@PapaSlingshot: That may be human requested, but it’s still an automated system doing the work/tweet 
@dayofjen: 2 be clear engines r going 2 give the author more credibility if they r using their SM directly & NOT via a tool?
@PapaSlingshot: I don’t think it matters as long as you’re not using tools designed to game social networks.
Do authors want high-level (head) or very focused (long-tail) credibility?
IMO focus your efforts on a few core topics. Think Google Panda. Are you a one-man content farm? Doesn’t mean you can’t talk about that NFL game just bc you’re an SEO expert.
Do the OPPOSITE of @shoemoney in every situation if you want to keep your author rank clean.
@ashbuckles: I would argue the friend count, however. I’ve seen my teenager’s friend counts and they’re enormous.
@PapaSlingshot: Great point! My philosophy.. ALWAYS do what TEENS do. Children are pure, naive and innocent. Another good group to learn from. Do what your parents and grand parents do on Facebook. Especially if they’re church goers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTJSWRu-Mp4 .
How do individuals & businesses differ when building author rank?
Everyone is going to HATE my answers to question 4. Time to roast me. I argued with myself on this one.
IMO Author Rank is for individuals primarily, not company brands so much. Brands clearly have different types of accounts on Linkedin and Facebook. Branded accounts should focus on influencing individual authors. Brand content not claimed by, paired up with individual authors should be cited by credible individuals for rank. Keyword in Author Rank is “Author”. Try telling your logo to write a blog post for you.
@AlanBleiweiss: individuals = authors. brands = publishers (check schema.org – it’s built in just for that reason). Schema has publisher for brand, author for individual. It’s the future, people. Welcome to it!
@ashbuckles: That’s part of the question. How do businesses deal with the author rank issue?
@PapaSlingshot: Build many personal brands within your company, such as @Distilled & @SEOmoz, who do a great job of this!
Do author rank algorithms reduce the discovery of new information for users?
Not necessarily. It will likely prevent discovery of new points of view, but hopefully not the facts.
You Might Also Like:
- Establishing Author Rank with Jeremy Dearringer (@PapaSlingshot) on #seochat
- Summary: Optimizing for Google News with Kaila Strong (@cliquekaila) #SEOChat
- Summary: Open Mic on #SEOchat
- Summary: Ranking with search query volumes & importance of CRO in SEO. #SEOchat
- Summary: Creating Authority Through Content on #SEOchat with @lorenbaker
[...] social indicators and author rank continue to be of interest, we see the correlation of people and their interests rollout as [...]