If you are like me, an author of web-based content, you care about your work. You get upset when someone plagiarizes parts of your content (or worse yet, simply screen scrapes your work and republishes it without attribution on another site). And frankly, you’d like to be recognized for the good work you do. Well, now there is something you can do about all of this.
At the SMX Advanced conference in June, Google announced it was supporting the use of the rel=author attribute in anchor tags as a means of identifying who wrote a piece of content. This is good news, as identifying the original source of valuable content has always been troublesome for search engines. Better yet, Google hopes to use the data collected by this feature to begin building author authority similar to the way valuable websites build site authority.
Unfortunately, the implementation process is a little complicated, and it requires a detailed explanation on what needs to be done to ensure that you and no one else earns authorship credit for your own work. Luckily, I’ve got that covered for you.
New blogger for Search Engine Land
I recently was invited to join Search Engine Land as a blogger (whoodathunkit?), and I used my first post, titled How To Create Your Digital Footprint With Links, to discuss in detail the process of implementing the rel=author feature. As such, instead of reinventing the wheel by writing another in-depth post on this topic here (or worse yet, creating duplicate content by reposting it!), I just invite instead you to visit Search Engine Land’s Link Week section or look at my biography page for a list of posts I’ve published there.
In case you’re interested, I’ll also be sure to keep my Additional posts on SEO page on this site updated with links to my new SEL posts as they are published so you can always find my work around the web.
Now get out there and claim credit for what is yours! Later… 
