Skip to content
One Man & His Blog
  • 👱🏻‍♂️ About
  • 📈 Consultancy
  • 👨🏼‍🏫 Training
  • ⌨️ Event Coverage
  • 📚 Guides
  • Log in
  • Subscribe
  • Latest
  • Journalism
  • Blogging
  • Social Media
  • Twitter
  • Publishing
  • Journalists
  • Politics
  • Facebook
  • 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 lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 25. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of 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

The Zeitgeist Project: The Curators Objectify Paid Members Public

To conclude The Zeitgeist Project Berlin, the eight curators who talked previously returned to the stage to pitch us on their choice of object that best represented the cultural zeitgeist. This is what they picked: Simon Waterfall The one speaker that frightened the life out of him was the Google

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth
30 Aug 2012
3d printing

Some Good Reading About The Future of News Paid Members Public

Good stuff I’ve read recently, haven’t linked to yet, but don’t have much to add to right now: * The Nichepaper Manifesto [http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/07/the_nichepaper_manifesto.html] – an articulate and well argued guide to how niche publishing might looks going forwards. * Media

Adam Tinworth
Adam Tinworth
31 Jul 2009
comments

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

The next few years will be a great time for journalism innovation

4 Sep 2023
A journalist bursting with ideas deep in the woods

Twitter’s decline has birthed a new social ecosystem

18 Jul 2023

Threads: first impressions of Meta’s new Twitter competitor

6 Jul 2023
A Twitter-like bird, entirely made out of sewing thread

Digital News Report 2023: the social challenge for audience growth

14 Jun 2023

Journalism’s polycrisis, explained

7 Jun 2023

This is how the future media ecosystem will look

17 May 2023
A number of supertankers on the sea, surrounded by smaller boast. A media ecosystem metaphor.

Author

Adam Tinworth

Adam is a lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 25. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of London.

One Man & His Blog

Digital journalism & the creator economy. By Adam Tinworth

Navigation

  • 🔖 Tag List
  • 📧 Newsletters
  • 📝 Notebook

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.
© 2023 One Man & His Blog - Published with Ghost & Krabi
↑