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Google Authorship for Ranking - via Forbes

Google plan to soon rank content based on the credibility score of the author. To do this the author of an article must consistently link back to their Google+ account, the algorithm will eventually determine his/her authority on a subject. Google have objective metrics for measuring whether an article is good or bad. They hint at this in their content creation guidelines: use clear, concise, informative content, use plain English. Write for real people. Keep links to a reasonable number. Make your content readable. Think about the words users would type to find your pages.

Write for real people? That is quite a troubling request considering that they are essentially asking us to write in a way that suits the preferences of their automated non-human critics.

Its a shame that Google want to command the use of written language and rank-punish what their algorithms measure as ‘bad content’ and anonymity (and all of us who don’t want to join Google+). Google boss Eric Schmidt wrote in his book:

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which would result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.