Google's new authorship markup tag

[HunkyLuke]

Google announced last month a new authorship markup tag that webmasters can use to identify themselves with web pages.

Their original article located here says:

We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

If you run a website with authored content, you’ll want to learn about authorship markup in our Help Center. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you're already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, we'll interpret that authorship information as well.

In a new video released today, Matt Cutts asks, "Will people get higher rankings? Is there a rankings boost for rel='author'?" Hansson then replies, "It's obviously early days, so we hope to use this information and any information as a ranking signal at Google. In this case, we want to get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking. We're only experimenting with that now. Who knows where it will go?"

Given Google's recent emphasis on 'trustworthy content' in their Panda update, it seems highly possible that this will become a SIGNIFICANT ranking factor in the future. Add to that the fact that you will need a Google Profile to use this new tag (read: Google+).

Here's a guide on how to use this new tag:
1. On every post, add a link somewhere pointing to your Google Profile
2. On that link, add an attribute rel="author"

The link can go anywhere, like in the header, footer or anywhere in the body. And you can wrap it around an image if you want to as well.

If you have multiple authors, then simply link each author's post to that author's Google Profile. "That could be as simple as just at the bottom of each post, have the author actually insert a link themselves, with this attribute on it," says Hansson. "Another thing that a lot of sites have, is…author bios."

[HunkyLuke]

here's the video clip