Google Authorship, analytics and the personalisation of search

John Pozadzides of Geekbrief.tv has spotted something interesting – Google has started including authorship analytics in some people’s Google+ pages.

Authorship, you might recall, is the markup you can add to your webpages, that “claims” them as your work, and which can lead to them appearing in Google with your profile pic, like so:


This change means that authors now have access to the sorts of analytics that you had to be a site owner and user of webmaster tools to have before. Great news for journalists who want greater insight into the performance of their work – and a fascinating insight into how Google is incorporating social into the way it works.

If this is rolled out universally, it’s another major step in Google stepping away from the website as the core unit of the web, towards the page and its author – with authorship and author reputation a core part of how search works.

Google’s adoption of social looks like its embedding itself very deeply into its core search product.