Here is a Blog Post from GotGabe.com :
If you’re like me and you have your finger on Google’s pulse on a daily basis, you’ve undoubtedly heard of AuthorRank. However, I honestly don’t think it’s received its due attention and if you were AFK for a few days or don’t have the option to be “jacked into the feed”, you may have missed it entirely.
As early as February of this year, the term “AuthorRank” started to surface in the industry. AJ Kohn wrote a great post on AuthorRank and speculated that this development could change the search game as we know it. He also stated that it would be “bigger than Panda and Penguin combined”.
If you’re like me and you have your finger on Google’s pulse on a daily basis, you’ve undoubtedly heard of AuthorRank. However, I honestly don’t think it’s received its due attention and if you were AFK for a few days or don’t have the option to be “jacked into the feed”, you may have missed it entirely.
Over seven years ago (in August of 2005), Google filed a patent for “Agent Rank” which was later masterfully decoded by Bill Slawski. In the patent, Googler David Minogue references ranking “agents” and using the reception of the content they create and their interactions as a factor in determining their rank. The patent suggests that more well-received and popular “agents” could have their associated content rank higher than unsigned content or the content of other less-authoritative “agents”.
Nothing much happened with Agent Rank after that because the idea of ranking “agents” is dependent on being able to identify them in the first place. No great system for claiming an online identify really existed back then; I wouldn’t call W3C’s XML-signature syntax or other digital signature protocol an ideal solution.
Still, ranking agents remained a goal for Google. In 2011, Eric Schmidt expressed that Google still had a desire and need to identify agents in order to improve search quality, stating “it would be useful if we had strong identity so we could weed (spammers) out.”
Literally the following month (September 2011), Google filed a continuation patent referencing a “portable identity platform” which sounds a whole lot like Google+. Profiles on Google+ make an infinitely easier digital signature system than anything that’s come before and, with the rollout of Google Authorship (tying a Google+ profile to pieces of content), it really sounds like that’s what we’re looking at here.
Click below to watch Gabe's tips on Penguin & Panda
So now Google can start attributing content to specific “agents” and doing just what they set out to do in 2005: rank them.
As early as February of this year, the term “AuthorRank” started to surface in the industry. AJ Kohn wrote a great post on AuthorRank and speculated that this development could change the search game as we know it. He also stated that it would be “bigger than Panda and Penguin combined”.
AuthorRank, of course, wouldn’t be a replacement for PageRank, but would be used to inform PageRank, therefore enabling Google to rank high-quality content more appropriately. I think AJ’s right on the money and that it’s not a matter of if Google rolls out AuthorRank, but when.
In Google’s never-ending mission to surface high quality, trustworthy content for their searchers, AuthorRank is really the next big step. After more than seven years, I believe they are just about ready to implement it.
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