I had already read and implemented the new markup on my blog the day before (thanks to yoast) so I didn’t exactly see Matt’s post as BREAKING, however that being said, what Matt’s post did was start me thinking about some of the long-term implications of what Google can do once Authorship is identified for content on the Internet. Why is Authorship important? I think Google says it best in that blog post referred to by Matt: “Many of you create great content on the web, and we work hard to make that content discoverable on Google. Today, we will start highlighting the people creating this content in Google.com search results.” And “This feature is powered by the authorship markup which we announced two weeks ago. We hope as more authors link to their content, it will improve your search experience and the quality of content being created on the web.” Is it just me or is Google actually trying to say something like: If we can identify the Author of the content, we list your content at the top of search results and bury the content thieves / aggregators? I sure hope so. There’s nothing worse than having your content stolen from you and then watching it rank higher in Search results than your original content. I personally experienced this after the infamous April 11th Google Panda updates and although I was able to clean up most of it by reporting the spam to Google, it was extremely time consuming on my part. Perhaps once this new Pilot program goes live across all sites and authors, this particular issue will be a thing of the past. Thanks Matt and team! Comment
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