Authority as a positioning signal on Google search engine
Every seo has heard about the most popular positioning signals. Backlinks, site optimization, social signals. All of these we know. Recently, however, the industry has been buzzing about a new type of positioning signal.
A signal that is strong enough to rocket a site to the top spots with virtually no help from backlinks, optimization or social signals to it. So what is it about? About the authority of a person or brand in the eyes of Google. This authority, however, does not come from backlinks, but from mere mentions of the person or brand on important and well-known sites.
We did a small case study related to a specific person, so the article will mainly touch on the authority of the person.
Rumors
We’ve heard a lot lately about how mentions of a brand or person online can be a valuable signal to Google. These reports, however, were mostly mere conjecture, unsupported in any way by evidence. Not discouraged by this, this topic interested us enough to keep us busy. Soon, completely by chance, we got a chance to verify this hypothesis.
The story of a strange site
We started positioning the client’s website. We started by doing what we always do at the beginning, which is to research the competition. We searched for the phrases we wanted to position our client for, and checked how strong the competitor’s sites were currently in the search results. Most of the sites were pretty standard. Good optimization, lots of backlinks from various sources. That is, the kind of site that should be at the very top of Google results for a difficult phrase. One of them, on the other hand, made us very curious. This page stood out from the rest. It literally had a few weak inbound links. After checking how well it was optimized for the phrases in question, we found that it was not particularly well optimized. It didn’t even contain anywhere in the content or in the meta tags the exact word it was positioning so well for.
The example of this site surprised us a lot. We have never seen anything like this before. A site that is unoptimized and that breaks practically every known rule of SEO shows up in the first positions under a difficult phrase. It completely made no sense to us. However, the sense was there, only we didn’t see it yet. We had missed one important thing that solved the whole issue.
Discovery
The revelation came a few weeks later, when we decided to discuss our client’s SEO once again. By the way, the topic of our puzzling SEO site coming up with nothing came back. This time we noticed something new. Since the site belonged to the health industry, the name of a doctor associated with the site appeared everywhere in the code. Next we decided to do something that turned out to be a breakthrough. We searched Google for the name of the doctor in question. And then everything became clear. The doctor in question had published a book. The publication of the book itself is nothing special. What is interesting, however, is the effect it has on Google.
Want to rank higher on Google? Publish a book
When you publish a book, information about it goes to most of the well-known book portals, no matter if it becomes popular or not. These portals include, for example, empik.com, merlin.pl, Google Books, lubimyczytac.pl, swiatksiazki.pl and many, many others. In short, if you publish a book, you end up on every major site describing new publications. These sites usually post a short note about your book with its description copied from other sites. The key thing is that they put your name next to that description. Google sees this because it actively browses these portals. In sum, Google sees that you exist on each of these portals. And it is very keen to use this in its search engine, because such a presence is a sign of having authority. A person who is mentioned so often in online media must be relevant. Of course, the publication of a book is only one of hundreds of methods of appearing on well-known portals. It will certainly also help to appear in the media, do something unique, or even cause a scandal on the Internet. It is important that they write about us.
However, how does this relate to standing in Google? This finding in itself means that the more recognizable we are on the Internet, the greater the chance that we will be more visible in Google under our name. Well, but after all, no one orders SEO under their name, but under specific phrases related to some business or service. And this is where we get to the heart of the matter.
Linking a person’s authority to a party
If we want to be much, much higher on Google, we need to link our sales page to a recognizable person. We are not exactly sure how much needs to be done for Google to catch on that the site belongs to an important person. That’s why, just in case, we advise you to do everything you can. That is, let’s put our person’s name in the title, in the meta description, on top of that several times on the page in its content. You might also want to use the Open Graph protocol and put the name in “og:site_name”. I also recommend taking advantage of schema.org tags and using them to mark our chosen person as the author of the page.
Results and conclusions
If everything goes smoothly, and our persona is sufficiently recognized on the Internet, the results of our site should go up dramatically. Oh, one more important point. It is necessary to remember that our persona should be related to the theme of the site. That is, there is no point in labeling the author of the site a famous gardener if we are running a site about cats. Google will catch the forgery and will not boost our ranking. If, on the other hand, we have a well-known doctor as a client, it really makes sense to strongly indicate that the site of his clinic actually belongs to him.
We invite anyone interested in this discovery to test and share their findings in the comments.
Author: Amadeus Gawino, SEO Specialist
