Google Authorship Clicks And Impressions Added To Webmaster Tools

We know that who you are is more important in Google now. Google has been pushing authorship markup for months. This ties you, as an author of content, to your Google Profile, which is linked to from a picture of you that appears next to your content in Google search results.

Google has been clear about aiming to turn this into a ranking factor, if it isn’t already. It gives Google more information about the credibility of a piece of content. If it knows more about who wrote it, it can keep that in perspective. We don’t know how big a role this plays, exactly, but given the emphasis Google has been placing on the concept in recent months, you’d probably do well to put some emphasis of your own on it.

Google announced the launch of author stats in Webmaster Tools. These show how often content is showing up – by author – on Google search results pages, allowing you to track clicks and impressions.

“If you associate your content with your Google Profile either viae-mail verification or a simple link, you can visit Webmaster Tools to see how many impressions and clicks your content got on the Google search results page,” writes software engineer Javier Tordable on the Google Inside Search blog.

The image at the top is what Matt Cutts would see here.

To see your own, you can log into Webmaster Tools with the same name you use for your Google Profile, and go to “author stats” under “labs” on the left-hand side.

Keep in mind that being under the “labs” label means it is still in its experimental stage, so there is the possibility that there are bugs.

For more on setting up your authorship, read these articles.