How does Google know who you are? | Authorship v. Expertise

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad. You recently did a website tear down of the Colorado School of Mines. Wow. Who’s going to the Colorado School of Mines?

Conrad Saam:

I hope my son doesn’t listen to this episode. They had some terrible coding on their financial aid page that showed up on mobile as Financial aid. And so I noted to them that they may want to put one of their brilliant CS students on making sure that they’re not sending the wrong message to parents who are excited to send money to the Colorado School of Mines. I’m taking, my oldest son is going to be really, really hard for everyone but him. My wife’s not looking forward to it. His younger brother who just adores him. It’s going to be a different world for him and I think it’s going to be hard on the old man as well. But we are going rent a car and do an American Road trip probably through the Montana route to the Colorado School of Mines. Your kids are at the earlier age of their academic career.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes.

Conrad Saam:

You getting ready for you buying crayons and getting back to school?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not crayons, but we’ll soon be back to school shopping. But we will have a second grader and a kinder gardener.

Conrad Saam:

Public Or private schools. Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Public schools. We’re very Fortunate and very grateful that we’re in a community that has really excellent schools and at least for now, I mean, who knows what the future holds. Butoh. It’s funny. I’m back in my hometown, so my kids are going to the same schools that I went to.

Conrad Saam:

Are you kidding?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t know. That’s good or bad. Amazing. Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

It’s amazing. Hey, I’ll take this moment to remind all of you that we’re going into the back to school time and this is when unfortunately we choose not to prioritize financing education and we end up with lots of teachers who are spending their own hard-earned money buying school supplies. So if you want to do good in your community, now is a great time to do that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Or to support an underserved community with backpacks. Right?

Conrad Saam:

Even better, right? Even better. There’s a lot of fundraising where I live. We are a fairly affluent community and I have limited desire to put more money into our specific school, but the school systems overall, there’s a lot of need. So you can find it, you can make a difference, you can get links and PR as well. And those two things are okay. You can do both of those things at the same time and it’s not it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, so you don’t miss your son too much. What else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

Alright. We are as always starting out with the news and we’re experimenting with a slightly different format. We’re going to be covering one topic in more depth instead of two topics at a surface level because we were running long and the data shows that you guys like shorter shows, and so we’re going to see whether or not that’s actually true. We’re doing one segment on answering a question around what Gyi likes to call expertise. And because I’m old and suck in my ways, I like to call authorship.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Even though we’re going to try to be a little more concise today, we will not cut that wonderful Lunch Hour Legal Marketing music.

Announcer:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

All right everyone, welcome to Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing. It’s nice to get back. We have more Google news to talk about, but some other stuff. Let’s hit what you always wait for the news. Now, Gyi. June 26th, Google came out with an update on maximizing performance on search around query matching specifically around brand. You and I have been very, very critical hypercritical of Google and the conflation of brand terms. What does this exactly change?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it’s supposed to give us a little bit more control over how brand is included or excluded and queries. There are four different updates and we’ll drop a link in the show notes, but essentially it’s a response to the problem that we’ve been harping on, which is is that there’s not a lot of control over showing and excluding and including brands.

Conrad Saam:

We’ve seen massive increases in the cost that people are paying for their own branded queries. There’s a lot of confusion and deliberate conflation on Google’s part. It will be interesting to see, and by the way, let’s be clear, this is a pay-per-click thing. It’s not an LSA thing, is that correct?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s correct, yep. Yeah, pure opacity in LSA still.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Yeah. We have no, which means we don’t know what the hell is going on.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

True, true.

Conrad Saam:

So we’ll see if some of these changes can actually improve the customers on the branded side of things.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, this might be a segment in the future that we’ll go deeper on, but today we just wanted to give it a shout. So if you’re a PPC person, make sure you’re on these changes.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. Messaging on Google profiles. Rest in peace, baby. Goodbye. Why do you think Google has killed messaging on the Google business profile?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, there’s lots of theories. Some of it relates I think, to the actual technology itself and working across platforms and encryption and security stuff. My hunch is I’m going to put it out there. I think you’re going to see messages come back, but maybe in a different product. Some of the other complaints are that these messages are small business owners are just getting spammed heavily in them, and so there’s not a lot of value, but I know a lot of businesses that they rely pretty heavily on the engagement with their Google Business profile messaging. And so if you’ve been a firm that’s relied on that heads up, and I would start already, in fact, we’re already too late because beginning July 15th, customers can’t start new chat conversations with and on July 31st, the chat feature will be removed. So I might put in your Google business profile something that highlights like, Hey, we know that there’s no more messaging, but here’s how to contact us. Obviously phone numbers, maybe scheduling links, appointment links, maybe put something in your post or your FAQs so that if you have been relying on this and it’s going away, you’re telling people, Hey, we’re still available in these other ways and you should probably download all of your history so you can use Google takeout and get all of your historical business profile chat data. I think that’s probably something good to retain.

Conrad Saam:

I think the other flavor of this is there are some, especially in legal now, if Google doesn’t only think about the legal market, but especially in legal, there are many situations in which people do not want to physically talk to you, audibly talk to you when they’re contacting a lawyer,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Physically talk to

Conrad Saam:

You physically. And so you need to be thinking about, for those of you who have prospects who don’t necessarily want to pick up the phone right now and talk, are you making it easy for them to contact you in an alternative method?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Totally. And we don’t know if this is going to impact LSAs yet,

Conrad Saam:

So we’ll find out once it’s already happened,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? My hunches is that it won’t, my hunch is they’re still going to have messaging. It’s too much money,

Conrad Saam:

There’s too much money, too much confusion, no

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Money in Google Business profile messaging, but money in LSA messaging for Google.

Conrad Saam:

And the beautiful thing with if you live in Mountain View and work in Mountain View, you can message multiple people at the same time, which means you can quadruple charge for those individual messages. Just saying, just throwing that out there. Okay. Hey, I’m seeing you twice in the upcoming months. We’re going to be at the Auto Crash Litigation Summit and we’re also going to be the law firm summer reboot camp. It’s going to be great. Looking forward to spending time with you if any of our listeners are going to be at any of those events. Although the reboot camp is virtual, so you’ll all be there or none of you’ll be there depending on how you look at it, but we’d love to see you and Gyi, I’m looking forward to spending more time with you in person.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And just for folks that are here, just so we’re made it clear, it’s the 360 advocacy is the Auto Crash Litigation Summit. You can see Conrad and I in Vegas in September. It’s the 22nd through 24th, and then it’s answering Legal is doing the reboot camp. That’s the virtual one, and that’s going to be coming up. I think Conrad and I are on a panel on July 24th, but it starts July 23rd through 26th, and then they’re doing it again in August. So keep your eyes peeled if you want to hear some more from us.

Conrad Saam:

And finally, I want to congratulate you on showing up on Legal Rebels. I have never been on Legal Rebels. I remember when it came out, I want to say in 2007 or eight I think is when Legal Rebels became a thing. I’m going to read this because it’s awesome and you’re not going to do your own crowing, so I’ll crow for you. Welcome to the ABA Journal Legal Rebels podcast where we talk to men and women who are remaking the legal profession, changing the way law is practiced, and setting standards that will guide us into the future. Keep listening. Dear listener, after the break, we are going to continue to guide you into the future.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I learned something new. If you’re a Spotify listener, you can actually leave comments in the Spotify app. In fact, we recently got a question from Matt Stevens via Spotify, Google’s algorithm exposed. Can you explain or point us to a resource that explains how exactly authorship is attributed and recognized on a given page? Do we just say in the byline written by X and link to their bio page? Thanks, Matt. We appreciate it. If you have questions about this episode or anything else, please do leave a comment in Spotify or YouTube. And of course, you can always contact on all of our various social media handles. Look for Lunch, Hour, Legal, Marketing, and with Matt’s question Conrad. Let’s dive in and try to answer it. We are so grateful When listeners leave comments and ask questions, talk to me about authorship.

Conrad Saam:

Authorship is a thing I’m trying to incite, Gyi into annoyance here. The not fact that I like the fact that Matt used the word authorship in his question. I think what we should do to answer this question is first go over the history and theory and concept of authorship or expertise as you would prefer to talk about it. And we can talk about why you and I use different words, but we will then go and talk about the current state of play because what you’re asking for is what to do now. But I think in order to understand what to do now, it is probably a good thing to talk about what authorship slash expertise is and why we care. So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You want to do that.

Conrad Saam:

You go, go ahead

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m give the philosophical take.

Conrad Saam:

Good go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

If I were creating a search engine that was trying to organize all of the world’s information, it might be valuable to the people who use my search engine that I’m including the who is doing the publishing, right? Because if suppose you’re talking about special relativity, well, Gyi’s page on special relativity is probably not as valuable, credible, expert, et cetera as Albert Einstein’s page on special relativity. So that’s the theory, right? The who publishes it matters. And so Conrad, what in the past did Google try to do to solve this or at least contribute to solving this issue?

Conrad Saam:

So I love this when it came out and when it came out, I knew it was going to be short-lived, but there was a thing that they created called Authorship, and it was relic’s author. It was code that you could literally put on a piece of content and it identified who the author was, and it did that by pointing the author of that content. It would just point to that person’s Google Plus profile. For those of you who are old in this industry, you’ll remember the belly flop that was Google Plus. It turned out the only thing people were ever using it for was to establish authorship. And it never really took off to take on Facebook. And it was very clever because all you’d have to do is like, here’s my piece of content about absolute relativity, and I’m going to put code in there that then links back to Albert Einstein’s Google Plus profile.

And that was a really, really cool concept. The problem with that, not just the fact that Google Plus completely sucked, and in conjunction with that and in order to actually, and really made this take off, is in the SERPs, you would actually get a little picture of your Google Plus picture, which show up in the SERPs. So there’s a little picture of Conrad who wrote a brilliant article about why digital marketing agencies are so scummy, and my little picture would show up there, which made me feel really good about myself, which was cool, and it really helped. And there were studies that showed that clickthrough rates went up when you had the little picture, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The problem, of course, is because of SEOs ruined it, and because it is code, I could take that page that I wanted to rank for, let’s say absolute relativity, and I could then change who the author was in the code.

And that is completely gross and spammy. And so what was happening, and FindLaw did this, I love this example. It was so gross and so flagrant. They would sell you a website that they had built and worked on and SEOed for the guy across the street, and they would sell you that website and then they would just change the authorship code to point back to your new profile. So it would look like to Google that you had authored all of these articles, and I’m not saying final was the reason that Google canceled this, but the abuse of code, we’ve seen this over and over again. The abuse of code is why Google often takes away nice things from us. And so authorship was killed, I want to say about 18 months after it launched.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, in fairness too, Google got rid of Google Plus too, which was being part of what they were doing with it, right?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But could mean they could have done kept the concept incarnation of Google Plus as a concept. But because it is coded and because it was abused, my take is because it was abused by SEOs. They put a bullet in it, except maybe they didn’t. So Gyi, do you want to talk about eat and why you and I fight over the terms authorship verse E?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I do. But first, let’s take a break and we are back and we’re going to pick up. Now, Conrad laid out the historical framework for authorship, and as Conrad alluded to that kind of authorship, the rel equals author, Google Plus version is dead. So you can’t do that. So now we’re back to, alright, how can Google try to distinguish content by author? And does Google care about expertise? Well, Google has a whole page about how you should be writing content for humans. And a big part of this documentation talks about this concept of EEAT, and we’re not going to cover all of the creating helpful, reliable, and purpose first content stuff. But we do want to talk about the Who, because that’s really, when we’re talking about authorship, that’s the part of this conversation that matters from an EEAT perspective. And I’m just going to read from the documentation on this.

So consider evaluating your content in terms of who, how, and why as a way to stay on course with what our systems seek to reward. Again, this is Google. So who created the content? Something that helps people intuitively understand the EEAT of content is when it’s clear who created it, that’s the who to consider. And when creating content, here are some of the who related questions to ask yourself. Is it self-evident to your visitors who authored your content? So as Matt asked, is this as simple as putting a byline in? Byline certainly helps, right? And one mistake that we see all the time is especially firms that outsource their content, I’ve seen it as bad as they didn’t update the author bio and WordPress, and it’s just admin. So it just says admin written by admin, or maybe it says written by the firm, but you’re not getting the who wrote this value if you don’t actually make it self-evident to who published it.

In fact, Google actually says the second thing, do the pages carry a byline where one might be expected? And so clearly, if you’re doing an article, having a byline that has your name in there I think is valuable probably also, maybe a short bio would probably be useful. The other thing that I will add here that is maybe not as evident is I would still use author markup on your content, and we can put this in the show notes as well, but Google provides best practices for author markup implemented by structured data, probably JSON ld. But again, the machines are still machines. They’re trying to get smarter, but make it easier for the machines to know. And then the third thing that Google recommends for this, the who part of the EEAT is, do the bylines lead to further information about the author or authors involved giving background about them and areas they write about.

So this is the intersection of byline with your attorney profile page. So if that’s going to have an attorney page on your website, and I’d be publishing on industry publications, websites, you want to make sure that that’s linking back to your attorney page with information about you, what you publish on, that kind of stuff. I think that those are kind of the big three that we talk about in the WHO context. Now, that’s just what Google publicly says about this, but there are all sorts of other things that I believe play a role in how they think about the who. And one of those things is brand recognition. When people append your name or the attorney’s name or the firm name to their queries, it’s the same thing we see with this Reddit conundrum because a brand that can actually impact also how Google thinks about you as an expert and your content. And we’ve even seen this with attorneys sink, where a non-brand query like law firm, SEO Google will suggest law firm SEO Attorneys Sync because it’s making that connection between our brand and the non-brand query. So because people argue about this, is this EEAT even a thing, how can Google even do this? And I think that it behooves lawyers to be obviously adding the byline stuff, but be thinking about how to generate users searching on brand queries and searching on brand queries that are modified with non-brand modifiers like practice, area and city.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, so I’m going to go to the specifics of Matt’s question. Can you explain or point us to a resource that explains how exactly authorship is attributed and recognized on a given page? And so we’ve given you theory on this, and so I don’t feel like there’s a definitive guide of do these seven things. However, reading through the tea leaves, if you were working on building up your expertise or authorship and credibility in a given topic, some of the ways that Google will go about doing that is, and they’ve done this, one of the signals that they’ve definitely sent is the social links on your Google business profile. For a while, they started adding those links, what they thought was accurate to Google business profiles. They now enable you to do that directly. And I suspect that’s because there was a lot of confusion between all the Robert Williams is of the world and figuring out which Robert Williams was the expert on SEO and which Robert Williams was the expert on mousetrap design or whatever it might be. And so you can now actually define on your Google business profile all of your social profiles in your social profiles. Typically, people who are content creators will push that content on those social profiles, which makes it easy for a computer to understand and identify a network of content that belongs to a single author. The other thing, Gyi, that I think is not talked about all that much but is I think very relevant to this conversation. It’s not just about you publishing on your own blog at the risk of unearthing an old term,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Your own domain.

Conrad Saam:

Your own domain, thank you. It’s really building expertise on an individual domain is antithetical to the entire concept of why Google was really good at as the search engine to start with, because it was looking at a literal web across the internet of expertise. And so part of that expertise is built by writing outside of your own content. And so for you and me, it’s very, very blindingly obvious. We should write things on technical publications, we should write things about marketing on the American Bar Association. Those type of things are fairly selfe. This is a component of building up your expertise. And it’s why I’ll connect the dots for you if you can’t figure it out. I post something on the American Bar Association about digital marketing. I mentioned that in all of my social profiles, which helps Google understand who the author of that piece of content was and the A BA is not going to have Joe Schmo write something up there. And so it starts to build up that profile of expertise and authorship. So this is kind of the GUI and Conrad version of what we believe is being done based on what Google is talking about. And in fact, that Google Algo leak referenced this concept of expertise in authorship. So I don’t think this is going away. I think this is more important than we think it is. And it can be an overlooked component of your SEO strategy.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, if you wanted an additional reading on this, I would refer folks to Google Search Central and specifically their documentation on creating help for reliable people. First content, they go pretty deep. Again, people say that Google doesn’t say anything about this. It’s like, yeah, they do. There’s all sorts of really valuable information in my opinion, in hearing questions you should ask to assess your content. And then the second place I would look in Google Search Central as an additional resource would be under the featured guide section and specifically on the structured data features with respect to article, there’s probably a couple other ones that are worth looking at. If you’re doing q and a. There’s a couple other things that you probably want to mark up so that you’re getting that quote, EEAT credit. Now, I will say this too, in case there are any, I know we know some other agency folks and some other SEO folks listen to the show so that we don’t get put on blast on social media.

Google does say that while EEAT itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, so people will say, oh, EAT is a ranking factor. Well, I don’t want to get semantic into it. They do say they use a mix of the factors. So identify content with good EAT when it’s useful. And they specifically call out that topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability or safety of people or the wellbeing of society that your money or your life topics, that it can be particularly useful in those contexts. And I will tell you at our agency that’s not in legal, we have clients that are in the financial world and we have seen that well attributed articles with Forbes is doing the same thing too. If you go, in fact, I’m going to use Forbes so I can be more specific because they’re doing it in, they’re a known site.

If you go search for generic legal keyword and this Forbes advisor pages come up, you’ll see that it is heavily quote EE aed. And I do believe in addition to the link signals that Forbes carries, I think that the SEO team at Forbes is smart. And if you want to learn, go follow what they’re doing in terms of how they’re doing bylines, how they’re doing, fact checking, how they’re doing, reviewing and marking the pages up so that they’re telling the machine this is a well-researched, edited, reviewed by an expert page. And I think that that’s part of the reason why Forbes is benefiting from that.

Conrad Saam:

We keep bringing up Forbes. Forbes, SEO in Legal is run by someone that you and I both know. Oh, maybe we should talk about that later,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe. We’ll, they’ll come to office hours. Alright,

Conrad Saam:

Thank you dear listener for joining Gyi and Conrad on another episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We have made this a more in depth, although shorter episode, and we’d love your feedback on that. Please send us feedback so the next time we can decide whether or not we’re going to keep this format or go back to our typical double segment.

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