A new tool is attempting to answer that: Virante AuthorRank. As Virante’s Mark Traphagen clarifies, Virante AuthorRank is not Google AuthorRank. It is an entirely indepedent formula based on various factors. The ratings it produces are:
– AuthorRank: This is the author’s overall Virante AuthorRank score. It is a combination of all the factors we assess. Use this to compare the overall search authority of the author’s content to other authors.
– AuthorTrust: This score is based on Moz’s MozTrust metric. MozTrust measures the “link ‘distance’ between a given page and a seeded trust source on the Internet. Think of this like six degrees of separation: The closer you are linked to a trusted website, the more trust you have, yourself.” So a higher AuthorTrust score indicates that the link graph of an author’s content tends to contain and be closer to more of the kinds of sites that search engines trust, and thus give more weight to their links.
– AuthorExternalRank: This score evaluates only the strength of links from external websites to the Author’s content. So it excludes other factors such as diversity of content sites, domain authority of those sites, and volume of content. So you can use this score to evaluate how well regarded and/or how often cited the author’s content is by other sites.
– Avg Page Authority: This score assesses the average search authority of the pages of content published by the author, isolated from any other factors.
– Avg Domain Authority: This score assesses the average search authority of the domains (publishers or sites) on which the author’s content is published.
I tried it and the numbers I got can be seen in the screenshot. I suppose I would need to see how other people score and how it evolves through time. All in all at this point I’m not sure I am highly interested since I mostly blog on G+ (which from what I understand is not taken into account at all in all of this) and my personal site is stuck in the past…
Learn more about Virante AuthorRank and test it out!
Tags: authorship, social, social media
