Author Rank Live!?!

Yesterday, Google confirmed that Author Rank is something that’s being used for “in-depth articles,” although the statement might seem a bit odd. Matt Cutts from Google is the one who shared this at SMX (Search Marketing Expo) and on Twitter, saying that Author Rank is being used. The problem is that he’s “fairly sure.”

For a long time, many have suspected that for certain types of articles, the author plays a bigger role than just being the producer of good content. With Google’s investment in Google+, where linking your articles to your profile allows your name and photo to appear in search results, rumors quickly spread that this would become an important ranking factor.

Matt Cutts has previously stated that +1s don’t affect the algorithm, but now it seems that by associating high-quality articles with your name, you might be able to boost your other content as well. The issue with Cutts’ statement is, as usual, the lack of certainty—unlike when he clearly said +1s didn’t matter. Now, he says he’s “fairly sure.”

The thing is, Amit Singhal just stated that they’re not yet using Author Rank. Those of us who’ve been in the industry for a few years have learned to read between the lines of Cutts’ statements—but when Singhal speaks, it’s worth paying extra attention. He is, for all practical purposes, Matt Cutts’ boss.

So why all the vagueness around Author Rank? Isn’t it simply a matter of implementing it or not? My personal guess is that it comes down to prestige. Most likely, the algorithm Google has developed for this purpose doesn’t yet meet the standards one would expect from a modern search engine. Author Rank probably isn’t good enough yet to be rolled out at scale.

That’s a problem, since Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, wrote in his book that it would be implemented into the algorithm. If the CEO has publicly promised it, and it later turns out that they can’t quite deliver—well, that could lead to a lot of “fairly sure.”