We're continuing a holiday tradition of sharing our best articles of the year. This article from BrokerageU was originally posted to our MLS channel, but the issue is so important that we thought we'd share with our agent and broker readers, too.

There have been multiple conversations about how REALTORS® / brokerages should force Zillow, Trulia, and realtor.com to use both authorship and canonical linking tags on listings. I want to take a minute and explain first what these are, and why this is a really big deal that should be carefully considered before acting. Please consider passing this post on via social media channels or using the email link below to other REALTORS®, MLS execs, etc.

What is Google Authorship?

A few years back, some very smart people at Google recognized something: they had all of these great posts but now way of knowing really who wrote them and if you liked the writer or not. Heavily optimized content was more valuable than good clean writing and sites like eHow starting gaining millions of page views for mundane topics. Google realized that when you're looking for good content, you want to know who the person is that wrote it and build an affinity with that individual. So they created something that was originally called AgentRank (now called Google Authorship). The idea was simple, figure out a way to tie an individual post to the person that wrote it. Soon after Google+ was launched, they then had a way to tie in the content with the person that wrote it. Have a special tag on each post you write link back to your Google+ page with a special tag rel="author"

The correct way to display that is some HTML on your pages that look like this:

Just to make sure people weren't saying you wrote the post when you really didn't, Google also implemented an authentication that required you to provide a link to the site you write on via your Google+ profile page. The benefit is that your posts then appear differently in Google and Google builds an affinity between the content you read and the writer that writes it. Have you ever seen a Google result that looked like this?

That's Google Authorship in action.