Google Authorship: Verification Benefits

Google authorship allows you to connect content that you create to your Google+ profile. By making this connection, you allow searchers to get a number of pieces of information about you right there on the search results. It will allow you to tie the content you create to your online identity and provide a snippet full of details about you as an author.

In addition to allowing searchers to identify you as the author and authority on your content, there are a number of other benefits to claiming authorship and having it confirmed by Google.

Improve the Visibility of Your Content
Including an author detail snippet in search organic search results will make your content stand out from the rest of the search results. Increased visibility will also encourage searchers to click on the link. Links with verified authors often appear higher in search results and will include the profile picture from your Google+ profile.

Increase Trust and Confidence in Your Content
By associating yourself personally with your content, you give searchers an increased level of trust in your work. They will generally have more confidence in content associated with a particular person than in something created by a nameless, faceless entity. Content associated with an individual author is often perceived as being of higher quality.

Provide a Centralized Location for Your Work
Your Google+ profile should include links to all of the content that you produce. Your name appears as a link as part of the author snippet in the search results. By clicking on that link, searcher can visit your profile and see all the online content where you have claimed authorship. This will allow a single location for searchers on Google to find more content specifically from you.

Add Extra Links to Your Content in Search Results
After a searcher clicks the link and reads your author-tagged article, it is very common for them to hit the “back” button to return to the search results page. If they spend some time on your article, not hitting the “back” button on their browser immediately, Google will add three more links to articles by the same author on the original search results page. This will give you four times the exposure for the same search results as you originally had.

While Google won’t provide a specific time limit that the reader has to spend with your content, it needs to be more than a few seconds, and is probably a number of minutes. This time is used as an indicator or satisfaction and interest in the author’s work.

Expand Searchers Exposure to Your Work in Multiple Locations
As if adding the three extra links mentioned previously wasn’t benefit enough, Google doesn’t limit the extra links to content from the same source. So, if you have a web presence in multiple locations or websites, any of them may populate when the three extra links are shown. This allows searchers exposure to facets of your work beyond the obvious results of their original search terms.