How Is SEO Affected by Google’s Authorship Markup?

Google has their hand in so many pies that it’s hard to keep up with the latest wonders that they either create or contribute to. This week Google announced a new markup option called Authorship, and it has serious ramifications for SEO and potential opportunities for those who are writers.

The Authorship tag works by allowing developers (and the CMSs they create or utilize) to denote a specific author for each piece of content, with links to the author’s page on the site. The author page, in turn, features additional markup that indicates what specific data is on the page. When Google is searched, it can display some of that data within the search results page, with links to the author’s page, additional content from that author, etc.

For SEO, this may be able to help circumvent authorship questions. Previously, duplicate content is penalized–this may allow Google to tell where the content came from, with the penalty going to the site that duplicated the original content. It works out well for authors, as well as site owners/publishers.