Certified authors

There is a profession that doesn't exist yet, but in my opinion, will be huge for copywriters in the coming years.

The concept I have called 'certified authors'.

In this article, I am going explain why you need author bios in your posts, and why Google's leak shows that it's going to become even more important.

The leak

Long story short, in 2024, there was a big Google leak.

Secrets of the dark art of SEO were revealed.

You can see all the details from Income School (link).

Several things came out, but the biggest one was that it was revealed that Google is tracking authors on pages.

As identified here (link), authors are a metric that Google tracks.

iPullRank showed in its study that authors are now "an explicit feature".

What it means

Your name and face on articles are now a metric that Google tracks.

This isn't surprising, as Google tracks over 14,000 data points per page.

(They probably don't even know what the algorithm is actually tracking at this point. The fact that they divide it up into 'features' and 'factors' shows they have no idea).

They were always ranking pages based on these things, but now the "author's expertise" has been bumped up.

This focus on authors is what will change the game.

Why Google would care

Google has said it doesn't mind AI content, and doesn't derank it, but it's important to remember that Google are known liars.

They explicitly said certain things were not ranking factors — but they were.

For example, they always said they didn’t rank sites based on how many clicks they got.

Turns out they do.

EEAT, or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, was previously a mantra for SEOs and Google confirmed this repeatedly, but this has turned out to be less of a priority than previously thought.

In my opinion, there is no reason why Google would want AI content.

In fact, I think that they actively don't want AI content, unless produced by their own Gemini tool.

They can't outright ban AI content, because it's hard to detect, but they can't promote it either.

The only way to attack it is to promote work that they know was written by a certified author.

Anyone in SEO knows that Google now wants "content created primarily for people" and a "people-first approach".

To me, this means that Google is secretly building profiles of high-quality creators so that they can weed out the AI sites, as they know real writers won't actually be publishing AI content.

Why this matters for copywriters

In the future, maybe even now, your name and face theoretically will improve SEO by itself, if you have other articles ranking on Google.

A 'certified author' in the eyes of Google.

The same kind of system exists with Wikipedia. Only trusted authors can publish articles, and I think soon the same thing will happen with Google, except you won't be restricted from writing, but instead only rewarded if you have been verified.

Only SEO writers with many articles will have an effect, and there may even be a set of guidelines that Google will publish in future for writers to become certified authors.

The future

This job doesn't exist yet, but I think it will.

Businesses will pay writers with many articles across the internet as their work will be rewarded in the rankings, and likely be shown in AI results.

I can also imagine the future Perplexity-style Gemini search engine of Google will have a 'human opinions' section, where it will propose data based on these certified authors.

So for example, if you Google 'lawnmowers', it will show you the options like Perplexity does, but then it will give you an opinion of a person like a speech bubble.

For example: "Caleb Hinton recommends this product and they are a certified author of gardening products".

This way, misinformation can be avoided, but traffic on Google can continue as normal.

Conclusion

So the main takeaway is: authors are being tracked on Google and contribute to rankings.

If you haven’t already, get author bios on your blog posts ASAP. For you and your clients.

Google is moving towards the more organic approach they dream of, and trying to gain further control over what they consider to be organic content written by humans.

For writers, this means that our online presence is even more important than ever because it could actually increase a brand’s clicks with just our name and face on it.

As you can see, here are a couple of author bios I have across the internet:

They’re not just to flex and get my name on the internet.

They are for SEO, as Google can identify them as legitimate articles written by an ‘expert’, (or essentially just anyone who vaguely knows enough about the topic).

I knew it was important before, but now Google has been revealed to be measuring and tracking it, it’s more important than ever.

Your name is on a database and is likely being tracked across the internet.

And think, now this is great for copywriters and authors.

Your name and expertise are being reinforced by Google.

Google is remembering your good articles and likely rewarding other articles if they’re written by you.

It makes sense if they’re looking to avoid churned-out content with no value.

They’re looking for certified authors on the internet now.

This might be the name of our new roles one day.