Putting the Love back into Links

Tom talked about Google's relationship with links, and how it has changed over the last decade. Over that time Google have been forced to scrutinise every link more and more to determine whether its trust-worthy and weight it accordingly. Tom highlighted how important, beyond the other algorithm changes and ranking signals they've introduced, the new Authorship markup is to Google in this struggle. By verifying the author of the page via Google+, Tom hypothesises that Google can assign more trust to a link and increase the amount of link juice it passes according to the authority and trust of its author. Tom went on to show how much information is available about authors if you crawl the authorship markup on a page, and provided a tool, AuthorCrawler, that crawled the markup on pages linking to any URL. He highlighted how tools such as this will likely be of increasing importance for linkbuilders over the coming year.

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