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Google Authority Boost: Google’s Algorithm To Determine Which Site Is A Subject Authority

Barry Schwartz on May 14, 2013 at 9:38 am

Yesterday, we covered and summarized the ten future Google SEO changes coming to Google’s search results by the end of this summer. But today, I wanted to pull out one point where Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said Google is working on an algorithm to give authorities in a particular subject a ranking boost for being that authority.

Google has long done this within Google News, but this seems to be the first time it’s talking about trying to determine subject authorities within Web search.

The portion of the video of when Matt Cutts talks about authority boost starts at 4 minutes and 37 seconds into the video and ends at 5 minutes and 3 seconds. Here is the video followed by my best effort at transcribing that portion:

We have also been working on a lot of ways to help regular webmasters.
We are doing a doing a better job of detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a specific space. It could be medical, it could be travel, whatever. And trying to makes sure that those rank a little more highly, if you are some sort of authority or a site that according to the algorithms we think might be a little bit more appropriate for users.

For more on these upcoming changes, see our post from yesterday.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.