Protect and Promote Your Content with Author Markups

Google has just provided a new markup for authorship which can be used to help you further claim ownership on content, which could be potentially scraped from your site. Google rolled this out to the New York Times first. When you go to their site you can click on any author and it will take you to their bio page, which includes links to all the content they've created. These bio pages are a familiar sight online:

If you use authored content you want to markup your pages with this new tag and create pages for your authors. Over time, the more popular your authors are the more content they can drive to your site. Take a look at what happens when the author above is entered into a Google search:

This popular author will drive more business to the New York Times pages as they have here with their author page. Adding this markup will also clearly tell Google who was the original author of the content and help them to decide which content to rank in the search results. While this is a brand new markup it appears this may push your site up in the SERPS as well as take the author's credibility and attach it to your site.

This is what Google published on the steps they take to identify the author of published content:

"To identify the author of an article, Google checks for a connection between the content page (such as an article), an author page, and a Google Profile.

1. A content page can be any piece of content with an author: a news article, blog post, short story.

2. An author page is a page about a specific author, on the same domain as the content page.

3. A Google Profile is Google's version of an author page. It's how you present yourself to the web and to Google. Use your profile to manage the information—such as your bio, contact details, and links to other sites by or about you—that people see. When you link your Google Profile to your author pages (or to sites you write for), you're telling Google that all of these pages represent you. If your content appears in search results, your photo (including a link to your Google Profile) can appear next to it. Content you've identified as yours will also be listed on the +1 tab of your Google Pro...