Since Google's release of Google's +1 button, webmasters have wondered about the effect of this on their web page rankings. In an interview, Google's Matt Cutts commented on this and on the effect of authorship on your rankings.

In the news: Another Google Penguin update, Google's John Mueller on the effect of your Google Plus profile on your rankings, Google updates the snippet guidelines, 1-2 algorithm updates per day, and more.

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Since Google's release of Google's +1 button, webmasters have wondered about the effect of this on their web page rankings. In an interview, Google's Matt Cutts commented on this and on the effect of authorship on your rankings.

At this time, +1 clicks are not that important

In the interview, Matt Cutts said the following about the importance of +1 clicks:

"In the short term, we’re still going to have to study and see how good the signal is. Right now, there’s not really a direct effect where if you have a lot of +1s, you’ll rank higher."

Authorship seems to be more important

In the same interview, Matt Cutts commented on the effect of authorship:

"There are things like, we have an authorship proposal, where you can use nice standards to markup your webpage, and you’ll actually see a picture of the author right there, and it turns out that if you see a picture of the author, sometimes you’ll have higher click through, and people will say, ‘oh, that looks like a trusted resource.’

So there are ways that you can participate and sort of get ready for the longer term trend of getting to know not just that something was said, but who said it and how reputable they were.

If you look further out in the future and look at something that we call 'social signals' or 'authorship' or whatever you want to call it, in ten years, I think knowing that a really reputable guy – if Dan has written an article, whether it’s a comment on a forum or on a blog – I would still want to see that. So that’s the long-term trend."

What does this mean for your website rankings?

1. Google +1 clicks:

Google +1 clicks have no direct impact on your rankings but they can still help you to get more conversions. Many people see Google's +1 button in the search results and a high number of +1 clicks could create more trust. If the number of overall +1 clicks increases, Google could also use +1 clicks as a more important ranking signal in the future.

2. Authorship:

Authorship could be a more important ranking signal in the future. If your website provides content that can be attributed to a particular author, authorship verification could help your site. At this time, the effect of a verified authorship on the rankings of your website seems to be low.

This could simply be an attempt to get more Google+ users.