Introduced on June, 2011, Google Authorship markup is the method to display the author’s information in search result for the content he or she creates. It is a way to connect authors with their original content on the web and help users to find useful and relevant content from great authors in their search results.

Authorship is Google’s effort to make sure that quality content is fed to its users. It is Google’s way of saying that the Author is real, an authority in his field and can be trusted! As a result of this, publishers will have no option but to create quality content if they want to benefit in the SERPs rankings.

AuthorRank  for Authors will be what Page Rank is to web pages (an example of a web page will be this blog post). Just as web pages are given a rank from one (1) to ten (10) based on their relevance and importance, the same will apply for Authors and publishers as well in the coming days. The reason for this being that, in the long run Google needs a ranking factor to guarantee reliable and quality content.

It will be a way for Google to determine and measure trust evaluation of Authors and publishers!

It’s not clear how Google will determines the authority of an author but my guess is that it’s a combination of average shares, on-site activity, incoming links and authority on Google Plus.