After integrated Google+ profiles into the search results as page’s authors, Google has announced it has added a new section to Webmaster Tools called “Author stats” so users could see how contents they have published on the web (and claimed authorship on) is performing.

New Section For Authors, Not Websites

The new section is detached in a way from all other sections in Webmaster Tools by not providing statistics about a specific website but about a specific author. Meaning that in the Author stats section the users can find pages stats from many different websites that shares the same author.

The design of Author stats is similar to the Search queries stats and provides information about page’s impressions, clicks, relative changes, CTR and average position. It shows all the author page’s statistics of the user’s Google+ profile that is logged in to. Google has provided a screenshot of the Author stats, of pages by Matt Cutts as author:

Problem, Solution, Feedback

Google has improved the author appearance (by Google+ profiles) in the search results few months back and a short while after began highlighting journalists profiles in Google News. These moves caused more and more authors to claim the authorship of their articles, posts and pages as it spread widely in just a short period of time.

The problem was that it became pretty difficult for authors to follow their content’s performances, if the contents were scattered over more than one website. Therefore, as a solution for this problem, the Author stats segment has been rolled out by Google.

I am still not sure if Google Webmaster Tools is the right location for this section or maybe it should receive some spot at the author’s Google+ profile. In fact, Google are also looking for more feedback about it and even posted a dedicated email just for that, [email protected].