Skip to content
One Man & His Blog
  • 👱🏻‍♂️ About
  • 📈 Consultancy
  • 👨🏼‍🏫 Training
  • ⌨️ Event Coverage
  • 📚 Guides
  • Log in
  • Subscribe
  • Latest
  • Journalism
  • Blogging
  • Social Media
  • X (Twitter)
  • Publishing
  • Journalists
  • Facebook
  • Politics
  • Video
  • Blogs

Will AuthorRank atomise your publishing brand into individual journalists?

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth
11 Feb 2013
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share on Pinterest
  • Share via Email
  • Copy link

flipchart-funster.jpgI’ve just finished another session of my SEO for Journalists course, run via journalism.co.uk. I love running this course – not only do I get paid for it (always a good thing), but it gives me the chance to spend the day talking to and working with journalists engaged in thinking deeply about how and what they do when the publish.

Today’s thought-stirring topic was the rise of the authorship issue in Google and the presumed AuthorRank that rises out of it. Two big concerns emerged as we discussed it:

  • As authorship is often linked to your Google+ profile – are you going to have to maintain two seperate profiles on the service if you want to keep work journalism and personal blogging seperate? Will Google allow you to do that?
  • How about titles where they don’t credit individual authors – are they going to be penalised for that approach?

The first point is the common clash on how people construct identity in the real world – often with multiple senses of self depending on context and company – and the attempt of many of the engineer-derived social tools to force us into a single, defined online identity. That battle will run and run…

The more interesting one to me is the dilemma that this poses for traditional journalism outfits that want to place brand value over author value. Google simply isn’t supporting that at the moment. The answer to the second question above is “yes” – the site will be penalised. You can’t assign authorship to a brand, just to a person. That means that your precious website will have to appear as a loose coalition of authors in Google if you want to take advantage of the SEO benefits of authorship.

This the the journalist-as-brand, site-as-metadata concept I’ve talked about in the past, as my experience of how people sample things like blogs from traditional publications online. However, now it’s being encoded into the structure of the search engine  that many people use as their entry point to the web. That’s a fundemental challenge to publishers on the way they view their brands – I wonder how many of them will attempt to ignore authorship so as to not open this particualr can of worms?

authorityauthorshipbrandingGoogleJournalismmetadataSEO
Adam Tinworth

Adam Tinworth Twitter

Adam is a digital journalism lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, a journalist for 30 and teaches audience strategy and engagement at City St George’s, London.

Sign up for e-mail updates

Join the newsletter to receive the latest posts in your inbox.

Please check your inbox and click the link to confirm your subscription.
Please enter a valid email address!
An error occurred, please try again later.

Comments


You might also like

Why is media so… conservative? Paid Members Public

For an industry so obsessed with news, why are we so reluctant to cover new things?

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth
7 May 2025
Journalism

Trust me, I’m a journalist Paid Members Public

We're labouring under the illusion that the public trust us. Time to wake up.

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth
9 Apr 2025
Journalism

Insights by email

Join the newsletter to receive the latest posts in your inbox.

Please check your inbox and click the link to confirm your subscription.
Please enter a valid email address!
An error occurred, please try again later.
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS

Featured Posts

We are become meme

26 Feb 2025
A Shiba Inu dog (the DOGE dog) rests upon the White House as storm clouds gather

Audience Engagement: two words, both matter

28 Nov 2024
An abstract image of audience engagement

Why we need new gatekeepers to counter AI slop

14 Oct 2024

Launching the Institute for Creativity and AI

10 Oct 2024

What the hell is happening at Automattic (part 2)?

25 Sep 2024
A knight standing in front of a tattered WordPress held aloft by an army.

AI: should publishers sign up or sue?

13 Sep 2024

Author

Adam Tinworth

Adam is a digital journalism lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, a journalist for 30 and teaches audience strategy and engagement at City St George’s, London.

One Man & His Blog

Digital journalism & the creator economy. By Adam Tinworth

Navigation

  • 🔖 Tag List
  • 📧 Newsletters
  • 📝 Personal Blog

Newsletter

Please check your inbox and click the link to confirm your subscription.
Please enter a valid email address!
An error occurred, please try again later.
© 2025 One Man & His Blog - Published with Ghost & Krabi
↑