Almost 1 Of Every 5 Google Searches Shows Rel=Author In Top 100 Results, Study Shows

Apr 27, 2012 at 8:45am ET by Matt McGee

What began as an experiment 10 months ago is now showing up in nearly one of every five Google search results.

I’m talking about authorship — Google’s use of the rel=author markup to identify content creators next to their content.

A new SearchMetrics study published this week says that about 17 percent of queries included at least one instance of rel=author within the first 100 search results. The company analyzed a million keywords — including a mix of navigational, information and transactional — and found that more than 170,000 included a rel=author display somewhere in the first 10 pages of results for each keyword.

What about on the first page, you ask? We asked that question, too, and SearchMetrics says its study found at least one rel=author integration showing up on page one for 3.07 percent of its one million keywords.

To be clear, SearchMetrics counted only the actual rel=author appearances in the main organic results; the study didn’t count author appearances in the “People and Pages on Google+” content box that occasionally shows on generic queries.

madonna-authorship

SearchMetrics also put together a list of the authors who appeared the most in those one million keywords studied, and the author with both the most overall appearances (4,274) and the most appearances on page one (1,658) is Diana Rattray, a food author and contributor to About.com. SearchMetrics includes an Excel spreadsheet that lists the top 200 authors at the end of its blog post.

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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http://twitter.com/mtuknov Михаил Тукнов

So, should we start using this tag?
city model

Search speed of google is really nice
dining room design ideas pictures
http://www.shoutmeloud.com/ Harsh Agrawal

Personally from a user perspective..I always find author image as a trust factor..Hope I will get it implemented on my multi-author blog without any chance of someone spamming this feature11
http://www.cutey.co.uk/ cutey

Does this work for business pages yet?
http://twitter.com/boyce_web BoyceWeb

As Google become more and more content driven, I think it’s wise to ‘claim’ the unique, quality content you write. Google will soon see you as more of Market Leader and someone of authority.
http://www.developmentcatalyst.blogspot.com/ Development Catalyst Admin

So this means article sites are mostly benefiting from this ,right?
http://twitter.com/ultimatesociali SocialMediaInjection

I think this is a great tip, does this also help with the authorship project I think this is still pretty confusing, however I can definitely notice results from having your profile appearing in search engines…

Thanks
David
http://twitter.com/denmarkenvogue Tina en Vogue

Interesting. Is this study for all languges? Or only on google.com?
http://www.dailytut.com Robin

Google+ is becoming must use service and i feel like i am being very much forced to use a website because i am a blogger. I have verified authorship for my blog.

Google is doing a great job by introducing various algorithms but no doubt they are screwing up the search results and what they claim as Quality for a website, not there now in their results.
seoservicescanada

I must say that it’s nicely done analysis. It’s always good to use rel=”author”
It gonna help you to establish branding and social exposure
http://twitter.com/seopeace SEO Peace

We believe Author mark-up and authorship algorithm is going to add more value to the quality of the content. I also believe that this algorithm will improve user-experience at the end of the day. So, with this 2 or more links coming from the same domain might have different value depending on the fact that how reputed and known the person in question is in the digital world. It will ensure publisher rely much on their personal profile and not merely on the link-value.
Ranga Rajesh Kumar

this concept is nice.. give high security to the posts…