Google: PR is Now an SEO Ranking Factor
“Today we’re beginning to support authorship markup — a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results. We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.”
Bingo. This is the Validation Era at work. PR in an SEO context doesn’t just mean PageRank. It means public relations. Businesses that activate thought leaders across the media cloverleaf will be primed to stand out more in search. In the future you must publish to stand out.
