Can Google Change Its Google Plus Policy Regarding Authors and Writers?

Here's some important feedback I submitted to Google Plus about their new Authorship Program, a program that favors staff writers at large publications and corporations:

At a time when more freelancers are supplying the Internet with articles, blog posts, books and websites, Google has taken a major step in minimizing their clout, favoring the established writers of big corporate entities. 

While this might not sound like new news, a major setback has been delivered to writers and authors who are not associated with any single corporate interest.

Google +, the relatively new social networking platform, is now looking to increase the visibility of established writers and authors by connecting their work through their social networking platform to the Google search engine ranking results. The connection is sure to increase the profile authors and writers, and, as a result, one would speculate, also the pay that they receive for the number of visitors they get when someone access the webpage they have written, but hold on a minute.

The only winners in this seemingly writer-friendly set-up are the big corporate media networks who hire writers as part of their staff, a shrinking number, indeed, in a tight economy where obtaining (or wanting) a job as a staff writer at a big corporation is not much more likely than getting a job as a typesetter in a graphic arts department. 

Why aren't the freelance writers and authors included so that their writings, too, are upped in Google rankings? One simple Google + option tells the story: Check that you have a email address (for example, levy@wired.com) on the same domain as your content (wired.com).

Any other writers/authors must obtain a Google + HTML snippet to include in the source code of the website in which their articles appear. The problem: freelance writers are paid to write on corporate websites, their most viewed works, but have no corporate email domain like the staff writers do. What that means is freelancers have to contact the corporation to give them the code so it can be inserted into the article source, which is on the corporation's website. Fat chance of them doing that. Why should they? If they do the freelancer's other self-published works (like blog posts) are also upped in the search engine results, thus competing with the big corporate website's viewership (and ad revenue). 

The result of the new Google + new author-visibility policy favors corporations with Google's assistance. 

Go figure.

Matthew Bamberg
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