Even though Google Authorship photos are gone, there are no signs of Google dropping the idea of finding real people behind the content. In fact, as we have discussed on our Google Hangout with Jen Slegg and Jim Boykin, Google is putting more emphasis on determining experts and adjusting their algorithm towards giving them more exposure (Read more on that in Jen’s Google quality rating guide overview).

Hence author audit is getting a hotter topic nowadays and not just for the sake of pleasing Google. Getting featured by established authors as well as attracting niche influencers to contribute on your site is a great way to build brand visibility and credibility.

Here are 5 (free!) authorship-related tools to discover and research authors in your niche:

1. Author-Discovery Tools

1.1 Article List => List of Associated Authors

Article Popularity tool is an easy and quick way to find authors behind content. I’ve been using it in combination with BuzzSumo which kindly allows you to export its search results. So:

Step 1: Search for your keyword using BuzzSumo and export results (You may want to play with search options as well as it allows to limit results based on the time frame!):

Step 2: Copy-paste all the URLs into the Article Popularity tool, wait for it to process and get Authorship and social media results for each page:

[Not all the articles will have authors assigned to them but that’s still a great author discover tool! Note the additional author on each author as well (Twitter followers, Facebook friends, circles, etc.]

1.2 People behind backlinks

Author Backlink Crawler is another cool tool to check out: It discovers authors behind backlinks! So just put your competitor’s domain and see which authors have been linking to the site from within author-verified articles:

1.3 Search results ranked by authors

ClearVoice: You can search by topic too and see most prominent authors on top! It actually ranks results by their own “Author rank” metric that they seem to be getting based on the social media stats of all articles signed by each author:

[Note that authors are tagged based on topics they write on! So you can discover many related topics using this tool as well and thus more authors!]

It also lets you search by Author Name to show most recent articles by that author as well as the aggregated social media stats from his/her articles.

2. Author-Audit Tools

If you are looking to see more articles by a specific author you discovered in #1, these will come really in handy. Check these to figure out more ways to collaborate with the author (or possibly find more blogs where *you* can contribute / featured):

• Find most popular articles by any author
• Find more places where each author contributes

2.1 BuzzSumo (again): They have an awesome operator that lets you find all (recent) and most-shared articles by the specified author.

Example: Author:Ann Smarty

[And yes, again, you can filter by date or the content type, e.g. “Article”, “Infographic”, “Interview”, etc]

2.2 Google: A little search URL parameter will bring up “More by” results by the specific author.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Author Name&tbs=ppl_ids:–000000000000000000000-,ppl_aut:1

where:

* Author Name is your Google Plus name

* 000000000000000000000 is your Google Plus ID*

Example (download this file with the full URL)

Bonus: *Your* Authorship-Audit Tool

Elokenz gets a featured mention here because it’s using Google Plus Authorship data allowing you to track your author-verified articles and also monitor who is interacting with your content on Google Plus

You can only use it for your own articles (so no way to audit someone else’s articles) and it’s more actionable than other tools on the list but it’s still something to look into!

The tool grabs your “Contributor to” section, crawls all the domains in it, finds your articles and grabs social media stats for all of them.

Elokenz also tracks those articles on Google Plus and alerts you whenever anyone is discussing them there (that’s a great way to discover connections based on your author-verified content!)

Are there any other free authorship-related tools that I am missing? Please share them in the comments!