Mark Traphagen   Apr 02 2012   Flag

Comment I left on the blog post: When author markup really kicked in for me (some time in January all search results for my content started showing with my author rich snippet), I too began to see my organic rankings and traffic rise. I immediately assumed it was some kind of artificial boost because of Author Rank. But calmer heads like AJ Kohn weren't so sure, and cautioned me that other factors could be in play. 1) Rich snippets are known to increase CTR. Increased CTR is a signal to Google that the result is relevant to the query, so your ranking may rise for that query because of that. There's a known reason for the higher CTR: human eyes are attracted to faces. So a search result further down the page that would have been passed over before now might get clicked before higher results. 2) I think for your example you may be overlooking that your Klout post got a lot of backlinks and was widely shared on social media. That undoubtedly had an effect on your relevance and ranking. After a lot of consideration, I've joined the ranks of those such as AJ who are skeptical that the full juice of AuthorRank has been turned on yet. I think Google is still in the data collecting stage.But your advice about concentrating in quality, relevant, content centered around your main topic areas is very important. Because when the "juice" is turned on, all that data will be put towards your author authority.