In this video, LawWebMarketing.com authors Tanner Jones and J.R. Oakes discuss the dismantling of Google Authorship and its implications to the legal marketing community.

A full transcript of the exchange appears below the video.

Google Authorship Update

Tanner Jones: All right. Good morning, JR.

JR Oakes: Good morning.

Tanner Jones: My name is Tanner Jones. I’m the Marketing Director at the law firm marketing company Consultwebs. So, we wanted to come together and discuss the latest topic of Google+ Authorship. And so we’ve asked my colleague JR Oakes, the Director of Search Marketing at Consultwebs, to shine some light on this important topic. LawWebMarketing.com has received several questions from the community about this topic, and so we want to take some time to address those. So thanks again, JR, for spending a few minutes with us this morning.

JR Oakes: Awesome. Looking forward to it.

Tanner Jones: Good. So if you want, can you just start by explaining what exactly is Google+ Authorship?

JR Oakes: Well, around the time Google rolled out Google+, they wanted a way to be able to authoritatively connect authors to their content. It went through several different iterations, but basically Google Authorship was a link from your website to your Google+ profile, and then your Google+ profile had to link back to your website. Now, that could either be one website or, if you are a writer who writes on multiple websites, you can list all the different websites that you write for. But the goal behind it was to give Google an authoritative link from your Google+ profile as kind of a hub and all the different websites that you write for with a link going to them and a link coming back, so that Google could tell that this was your piece of content that was written by you, and that it had your Authorship, your Google+ profile was a hub of that.

Tanner Jones: That makes sense, and I guess one of the most basic levels of Google Authorship from an outward facing standpoint, at least to the public, was that it allowed your thumbnail photo to show up beside the search results within any piece of content you develop that’s tied to your name. Whether it be on your own blogs, on websites, or an offsite website, your picture would show up beside the search result, which was a huge benefit because it encouraged mores click throughs, or at least that was the thought behind it, correct?

JR Oakes: Right. Well, I think that was a way Google could kind of leverage their search results to drive adoption by having the thumbnail on there. I think the ultimate goal was not the thumbnail. I think the ultimate goal was to be able to tell between content A and content B, which was written by a real person. We are coming out of a time when Google was having a lot of issues with spam and “generated content,” so being able to have that authoritative tie to the person who actually wrote it was probably their most important factor. For a lot of search marketers, that thumbnail was an important factor because it was seen as a way to drive click-through rates for their results, but I think that piece of it was just a way to encourage adoption from Google.

Tanner Jones: Right, so with all that said, last week we got the news that Google has dropped Authorship altogether. It was alarming to me and I’m curious to know, was it alarming to you and also can you explain the reason for why they dropped Authorship?

JR Oakes: Well, it was alarming to us. I think there were several threads going around about this. Google – I think it was in December – lowered the amount of Authorship results and then a few months later they said, “Okay, we’re going to be removing Authorship results,” and then they came out and said, “Okay, we’re going to be just killing Google Authorship altogether.” So that’s alarming for somebody who’s told a lot of clients, you want to do Authorship because you want to have that image there in the results. Because if there are 10 listings on a page and yours has as an image, that’s a chance to draw all the users to that individual listing.

So it is a shock, but I think if we’re taking Google’s John Mueller at face value, he says that in the testing they did there was no discernable difference in click-through rate when their Authorship picture was there or not there. I know when Google Authorship first rolled out, especially in legal (websites), there were not a lot of people using it. I imagine that there was a more discernable click-through rate for the one listing that had Authorship, but as we see in more competitive niches like legal, people will do whatever they can to get an advantage over someone else. Over the past year and a half we saw almost every website in legal implementing Google Authorship. So obviously, you didn’t want to be the one left out there.

But regardless, across all of Google’s results, John Mueller comes right out and says that there was no major difference with the Authorship or without the Authorship.

I think from Google’s standpoint there’s a big push for them to have kind of a universal appearance of their search results across tablets, phones, desktop. And I think that’s probably one of the biggest reasons for it: Because Authorship works really well to have thumbnails on desktop, but on mobile you can imagine that when a thumbnail is there it gets a little complex. I guess from a usage standpoint they didn’t see a big difference. And then from universal results across different devices, it hurt them because they want consistency across devices.

Tanner Jones: Yeah, I can definitely see that. We all use our mobile devices almost as frequently as we use our desktop PCs. We’re seeing the statistics increase from month to month with more and more people using their mobile device to browse the Web and give them the smaller screens, smaller real estate. Google has to really look at ways to clean up their search results so that it is easy to find exactly what they’re looking for. It definitely makes sense to make the results consistent, whether it’s someone searching on their PCs or someone searching on their mobile device.

JR Oakes: Right, absolutely.

Tanner Jones: I guess that the biggest question there – if I’m an attorney, how does this affect me? And also I’m thinking about the ones who have been forward thinking and proactive in making sure that their Authorship is properly connected and they’re getting credit for the content they’re producing. All this work that has been applied to date to ensure that Authorship was set up – what are we losing because of this? And I know that’s a question on all these firms’ minds.

JR Oakes: Well, I think the majority of the work for Authorship was just to make sure that it was implemented. At the end of the day, Google Authorship is fairly simple to implement: You have a piece of code put into the website and pointed to your Google+ profile, and then on your Google+ profile you had a link to a website that you wrote for. So the implementation of it was pretty straightforward.

In terms of the content, I still feel like there’s a big interest by Google to want to discern the author of pieces. SEO expert Bill Slawski has mentioned patents, and we’ve even seen this in the search results, that the pieces of content that didn’t have Authorship set up on it, Google still was able to find a way to attribute Authorship to that piece of content. So I think that I wouldn’t change anything with the way I’m writing. Just because Google is pulling the plug on this method of attributing Authorship to a particular post doesn’t mean that they, (a) don’t have other ways to get that information, and (b) it doesn’t mean that they think knowing the authorship of a post isn’t important anymore. I think that’s important. So I think from a writing content standpoint, you still need to make sure that you’re writing extremely high quality content because Google is going to find a way to do that even though this method may not have worked the way they wanted it to work.

Tanner Jones: I see, and that’s good advice. I guess another question that stems from that is, for the attorneys who have found opportunities to contribute content to other offsite websites, is it still valuable for them to continue that practice of blogging for other authoritative websites?

JR Oakes: There are reasons to blog for other authoritative websites that go far beyond Authorship. If you are able to write a post on another high traffic website, you’re basically broadening your reach as an author. If you write authoritatively on something, you have links on that post. We see those links come through as referral traffic to main websites. You are also just broadening and getting in front of other audiences, which, if you take away Google Authorship and everything, writing on that website is all about broadening your reach, broadening your audience, getting your message out to other people, driving referral traffic – which are all the basic tenets of search marketing to begin with.

Tanner Jones: We’ll wrap the discussion up with asking you personally – it’s obvious that you’ve kept very close track of these changes and I know you’ve been in the search marketing world for a while now, and specifically in the legal niche – but I’d like to end by asking you, how do you see this rolling out and what is your projection for how Google is going to adjust? What are the new pieces of being able to reward credible authors and experts? Or beyond that, what can attorneys do to prepare for any of those changes coming up?

JR Oakes: There has been a lot of talk for the last few weeks about Google’s Knowledge Vault, which is basically a machine learning that’s scouring the Web looking for known facts about entities. An entity – it could be a person, it could be a place, it could be a sport, whatever – is just things that they are collecting information about. Currently, Google’s Knowledge Vault has 302 million confident facts that they know, with a high level of confidence that these are actual facts about these things. That’s tremendous.

Google also has a project called Freebase that are kind of hand edited facts. The important thing about the Knowledge Vault is that this is an algorithm that goes out and collects and mines these facts and puts them together. So from an Authorship standpoint, I don’t think you can go back and say, “Google Authorship failed, so we can go back and spin content, hire some very cheap labor to throw as much content on the sites as possible,” because to a certain extent, one of the thought lines around Authorship is they don’t need it anymore. Authorship could be seen as a way to corroborate some of the other data mining that they were doing and checking it against and saying, “Okay, is this actually accurate?”

The level of utilization of Google Authorship was really low. In certain industries like legal or more competitive industries, utilization was very high, but across the board in different areas, I think it was shown to be very inconsistent in usage, and probably it wasn’t a good way to go about attributing authorship. But with Google’s focus on machine learning and also with the algorithm of the Knowledge Vault, which goes through and collects all this data, it would be silly to think you can go back to the way it was. I think it’s going to be more and more important, not only the content that you write because Google know facts – the difference between facts and fallacies – so the content that you write is even more important these days because they can actually fact check your content. And I’m sure that they’re going to find ways to attribute Authorship because that’s very important to them. It could be through the Knowledge Vault that they are building, or it could be other ways. But I know it’s important enough for Google to have done the Google+ Authorship experiment to begin with. So I know it’s important for them down the road, so I would stay in alignment with trying to only write the best quality content you can.

Tanner Jones: Right. The biggest takeaway from this is the death of Google Authorship doesn’t mean the death of quality content marketing. It’s still critical for attorneys to be voicing their expertise throughout the Web and sharing their knowledge, sharing their expertise. That’s what is going to ultimately establish them as further credible authors, and they’ll continue to get rewarded by Google even without Authorship. So for those of you who are concerned that all the efforts that you’ve put in to writing quality content throughout the Web, you are still going to continue to get rewarded for that even though Google Authorship is virtually no more.

So thank you very much, JR, for sharing very helpful information with others. If there are additional questions that arise based on this discussion, we certainly encourage you to submit those questions through LawWebMarketing.com, as well as Google+. We’ll be happy to address it and more than happy to develop a follow up Hangout if need be. So thanks again, JR, for your time.

JR Oakes: Okay, thanks. I enjoyed it.