Recently, Google Webmaster Trends analyst Gary Illyes surprised many of us with a remark he made during his keynote Q&A with Danny Sullivan at SMX East in New York City. Illyes said that he recommended webmasters not remove the rel=author tag from their site content.
Google had used rel=author as part of its Google Authorship feature that (potentially) displayed a special author rich snippet in search results for content using the tag. Google ended support of this feature in August 2014.
The phrase that made everyone sit up and say, "Did he just say that?" was this: "...because it is possible Google might make use of [rel=author] again in the future."
Even though Google's John Mueller made the same recommendation after he announced that Google was no longer making use of Google Authorship in search (to be precise, Mueller said leaving the tag in place "did no harm"), Illyes's statement seemed to shock many because Google has said nothing about Google Authorship or the rel=author tag since they said they stopped supporting it.
In a subsequent Twitter exchange I had with Gary Illyes, he explained that if enough users are implementing something, Google might consider using it. I asked him if that meant specifically if more people started using rel=author again, that Google might make use of it again. Illyes replied, "That would be safe to say."
Before I provide my commentary on what all this means, and whether we should expect to see a resumption of Google Authorship in Google Search, let me provide a brief overview of Authorship for anyone who may not be familiar with it. If you already understand Google Authorship, feel free to skip down to the Will Google Bring Back Authorship? section.
A brief history of Google Authorship
Google Authorship was a feature that showed in Google Search results for about three years (from July 2011 until August 2014). It allowed authors and publishers to tag their content, linking it to an author's Google+ profile, in order to provide a more-certain identification of the content author for Google.
In return, Google said they might display an authorship rich snippet for content so tagged in search results. The authorship rich snippet varied in form over the three years Authorship was in use, but generally it consisted of the author's profile photo next to the result and his or her byline name under the title. For part of the run of Authorship, one could click on an author byline in search to see results showing related content from that author.
Google Authorship began with an official blog post in June of 2011 where Othar Hansson announced that Google would begin supporting the rel=author tag, but with no specifics on how they might use it.
Then in a July 2011 video, Hansson and Matt Cutts explained that Google+ would be the hub for author identification, and that Google might start showing a special Authorship rich snippet result for properly tagged content.
Those rich snippets slowly began appearing for more and more authors using rel=author over the next several months. During the three years of the program, Google experimented with many different configurations of the rich snippet, and also which authors and content would get it in response to various search queries.
Interest in Google Authorship from the SEO and online marketing communities was spurred even more by its possible connection to Google's Agent Rank patent, first revealed by Bill Slawski. In this patent, Google described a system by which particular "agents" or "entities" could be identified, scored by their level of authority, and that score then be used as a search ranking factor.
Since one of the types of agents identified in the patent was a content author, the patent rapidly became known as "author rank" in the SEO community. The connection with Authorship in particular, though, came from Cutts and Hansson stating in the above-mentioned Authorship video that Google might someday use Authorship as a search ranking factor.
Speculation about so-called Author Rank, and whether or not it was "on" as a ranking factor, continued throughout the life of the Authorship program. Throughout that period, however, Cutts continued to refer to it as something Google might do in the future. (You can find my own take on why I believed Authorship was never used as a direct ranking factor here.)
The first hint that Google might be drawing back from Authorship came at Pubcon Las Vegas in October 2013 when Matt Cutts, in his keynote "State of Search" address, revealed that at some point in the near future Google would be cutting back on the amount of Authorship rich snippets shown by "around 15%." Cutts said that in experiments, Google found that reducing Authorship rich snippets by that much "improved the quality of those results.”
Sure enough, in early December of that year, Moz's Peter Meyers detected a rapid decline over several days in the number of Authorship rich snippets in search results, as measured by his Mozcast Features tool.
Around that same time Google implemented what I called "two-class Authorship," a first class of authors who continued to get the full rich snippet, and a second class who now got only a byline (no author photo).
Finally, in August 2014, this author was contacted directly by John Mueller, offering to share some information under an NDA embargo until the information was made public. In my call with Mueller, he told me that he was letting me know 24 hours in advance that Google Authorship was going to be discontinued. He added that he was making this call as a courtesy to me since I had become the primary non-Google source of information about Authorship.
With that information, Eric Enge and I were able to compose an in-depth article on Authorship and its demise for Search Engine Land that went live within two minutes of John Mueller's own public announcement on Google+. In our article linked above, Eric and I give our takes on the reasons behind the death of Authorship and the possible future of author authority on Google.
Will Google bring back Authorship?
From the day Authorship was "killed" in August 2013, we heard no more about it from Google—until Gary Illyes's remarks at SMX East. So do Gary's remarks mean we should expect to see a return of Google Authorship to search results?
I don't think so, at least not in any form similar to what we saw before.
Let me explain why.
1. Illyes made no promise. Far too often people take statements about what Google "could" or "might" do from spokespersons like Gary Illyes, Matt Cutts, and John Mueller and translate "could/might" to "will." That is unfair to those spokespeople, and an abuse of what they are saying. Just because something is spoken of as a possibility, it does not follow that a promise is being made.
2. It ain't broke so.... So if there are no actual plans by Google to restore Google Authorship, why would Illyes make a point of stating publicly that authors and publishers should continue to use the rel=author tag? I think a primary reason may be that once Google gets any set of people to begin using any kind of schema, they'd rather have it remain in place. Anything that helps better organize the information on web pages is good for a search engine, whether or not that particular information is "in play" at present.
In the case of rel=author, I think it still may be useful to Google to be able to have confidence about content connected with certain authors. When Authorship ended, many people asked me if I were going to remove the tags from my content. I responded why would I? Having them there doesn’t hurt anything. But more important, as an author trying to build my personal brand reputation online, why wouldn't I want to give Google every possible hint about the content with which I should be identified?
3. The reasons why Authorship was killed still remain. As with any change in Google search, we'll probably never know all the reasons behind it, but the public reasons stated by John Mueller centered around Google's commitment to a "mobile first" user experience strategy. Mobile first is a recognition that search is more and more a mobile experience. Recently, Google announced that more of all searches are now done on mobile than desktop. That trend will likely never reverse.
In response, we've seen Google continually moving toward simpler, cleaner, less-cluttered design in all its products, including search. Even their recent logo redesign was motivated by the requirements of the small screen. According to Mueller, Authorship snippets were too much clutter for a mobile world, with not enough user benefit to justify their continuation.
In our Search Engine Land article, Eric Enge and I speculated that another reason Google may have ended the Authorship experiment was relatively poor adoption of the tagging, low participation in Google+ (which was being used as the "anchor" on Google's side for author identification), and incorrect implementation of the tags by many who did try to use them.
On the latter point, Enge conducted a study of major publishers, which showed that even among those who bothered to implement the authorship tagging, the majority was doing it wrong. That was true even among high-tech and SEO publications!
Alt that points to a messy and lopsided signal, not the kind of signal a search engine wants. At the end of the day, Google couldn't guarantee that a result showing an Authorship rich snippet was really any better than the surrounding results, so why give it such a prominent highlight?
Despite Gary Illyes saying that if more sites used rel=author Google might begin using it again, I don't see that doing so would change any of the conditions stated above. Therefore, I believe that any future use of rel=author by Google, if it ever occurs, will look nothing like the Authorship program we knew and loved.
So is there any future for author authority in search?
To this question, I answer a resounding "Yes!"
Every indication I've had from Googlers, both publicly and privately, is that author authority continues to be of interest to them, even if they have no sound way to implement it yet.
So how would Google go about assessing author identity and authority in a world where authors and publishers will never mass-tag everything accurately?
The answer: the Knowledge Graph, entity search, and machine learning.
The very first attempts at search engines were mostly human-curated. For example, the original Yahoo search was fed by a group of editors who attempted to classify every web page they came across. But as the World Wide Web took off and started growing exponentially, it was quickly obvious that such attempts couldn't scale. Hyperlinks between web pages as a means of assessing both the subject matter and relative authority of web pages proved to be a better solution. Search at the scale of the web was born.
Remember that Google's actual mission statement is to "organize the world's information." Over time, Google realized that just knowing about web pages was not enough. The real world is organized by relationships between entities—persons, places, things, concepts—and Google needed a way to learn the relationships between those things, also at scale.
The Knowledge Graph is the repository of what Google is learning, and machine learning is the engine that helps them do that learning at scale. At a simple level, search engine machine learning is the development of an algorithm that learns on its own as a result of feedback mechanisms. Google is applying this technology to the acquisition of and linking together of entities and their relationships at scale.
It's my contention that this process will be the next evolutionary step that will eventually enable Google to identify authors who matter on a given topic with their actual content, evaluate the relative authority of that content in the perceptions of readers, and use that as a search ranking factor.
In fact, Matt Cutts seemed to hint at a Knowledge Graph-based approach in a June 2013 video about the future of authorship where he talked about how Google was moving away from dependence on keywords, from “strings to things,” figuring out how to discover the “real-world people” behind web content and “their relationships” to improve search results.
Notice that nothing in a machine learning process is dependent upon humans doing anything other than what they already do on the web.
The project is already underway. Take a moment right now and ask Google, "Who is Mark Traphagen?" If you are in the US or most English-speaking countries, you'll probably see this at the top of the results:
That's a Knowledge Panel result from Google's Knowledge Graph. It reveals a couple of things:
1. Google has a high confidence that I'm likely the droids, er, the "Mark Traphagen" you're looking for. There are a few other Mark Traphagens in the world who potentially show up in Google Search, but Google sees that the vast majority of searchers who search for "Mark Traphagen" are looking for a result about me. Thanks, everybody!
2. Google has high confidence that the Mark Traphagen you're looking for is the guy who writes for Search Engine Land, so that site's bio for me is likely a good instant answer to your lifelong quest to find the Real Mark Traphagen (a quest some compare to the search for the Holy Grail).
If Google can continue to do that at scale, then they can lick a problem like assessing author authority for search rankings without any help from us, thank you very much.
How does all this fit with Gary Illyes's recommendation? I think that while Google knows it ultimately has to depend on machine learning to carry off such projects at scale, any help we can give the machine along the way is appreciated. Back in the Google Authorship I days, some of us (myself included) believed that one of the real purposes for the Authorship project was to enlist our help in training the machine learning algorithm. It may be that rel=author is still useful for that.
What might Authorship look like in the future?
Allow me to speculate a bit.
I don't expect we'll ever again see the mass implementation of author rich snippets we saw before, where almost anyone could get highlighted just for having used the tagging on their content and having a Google+ profile. As I stated above, I think Google saw that doing that was a non-useful skewing of the results, as more people were probably clicking on those rich snippets without necessarily getting a better piece of content on the other end.
Instead, I would expect that Google would see the most value in identifying the top few authors for any given topic, and boosting them. This would be similar to their behavior with major brands in search. We often see major, well-known brands dominating the top results for commercial queries because user behavior data tells Google that's what people want to see. In a similar way, people might be happy to be led directly to authors they already know and trust. They really don't care about anyone else, no matter how dashing their profile image might be.
Furthermore, for reasons also stated above, I don't expect that we'll see a return to the full rich snippets of the glory days of Authorship I. Instead, the boost to top authors might simply be algorithmic; that is, other factors being equal, their content would get a little ranking boost for queries where they are relevant to the topic and the searcher.
It's also possible that such author's content could be featured in a highlighted box, similar to how we see local search results or Google News results now.
But notice what I said above: "...when [the authors] are relevant to the topic and the searcher." That latter part is important, because I believe it is likely that personalization will come into play here as well. It makes sense that boosting or highlighting a particular author has the most value when my search behavior shows that author already has value to me.
We already see this at work with Google+ posts in personalized (logged in) search. When I search for something that AJ Kohn has posted on Google+ while I'm logged in to my Google account, Google will elevate that result to my first page of results and even give it a good old-fashioned Authorship rich snippet! Google has high confidence that's a result I might want to see because AJ is in my circles, and my interactions with him and his content show that he is probably very relevant and useful to me. Good guess, Google, you're right!
It is now obvious that Google knows they have to expand beyond Google+ in entity identification and assessment. If Google+ had taken off and become a real rival to Facebook, Google's job might have been a lot easier. But in the end, building machine learning algorithms that sniff out our “who's who” and “who matters to whom” may be an even better, if vastly more difficult, solution.
So to sum up, I do expect that at some point in the future, author authority will become a factor in how Google assesses and ranks search results. However, I think that boost will be a "rich get richer" benefit for only the top, most reputable, most trusted authors in each topic. Finally, I think the output will be more subtle and personalized than we saw during the first attempt at Authorship in search.
How to prepare for Authorship II
Since it is unlikely that Authorship II, the future implementation of author identity and authority in search, will be anything like Authorship I, is there anything you can be doing to increase the odds that Authorship II will benefit you and your content? I think there are several things.
1. Set a goal of being the 10X content creator in your niche. Part of the Gospel According to Rand Fishkin these days is that "good, unique" content is not good enough anymore. In order to stand out and get the real benefits of content, you've got to be producing and publishing content that is ten times better than anything currently on page one of Google for your topic. That means it's time to sacrifice quantity (churning out posts like a blogging machine) for quality (publishing only that which kicks butt and makes readers stand up, take notice, and share, recommend and link).
2. Publishers need to become 10X publishers. If you run a publishing site that accepts user-generated content, you've got to raise your standards. Accepting any article from any writer just to fill space on your pages won't cut it.
3. Build and encourage your tribe. If you are authoring truly great, useful stuff, sooner or later you will start to attract some fans. Work hard to identify those fans, to draw them into a community around your work, and to reward and encourage them any way you can. Become insanely accessible to those people. They are the ones who will begin to transmit the signals that will say to Google, "This person matters!"
4. Work as hard offline as you do online. Maybe harder. More and more as I talk with other authors who have been working hard at building their personal brands and tribes, I'm hearing that their offline activities seem to be driving tremendous benefit that flows over into online. I'm talking about speaking at conferences and events, being available for interviews, being prominent in your participation in the organizations and communities around your topic, and dozens of other such opportunities.
BONUS: Doing all four of those recommendations will reap rewards for you in the here and now, whether or not Google ever implements any kind of "author rank."
The natural power of the fact that people trust other people long before they will trust faceless brands continues, in my opinion, to be one of the least understood and underutilized methodologies in online marketing. Those who work hard to build real author authority in their topic areas will reap the rewards as Google begins to seek them out in the days to come.
THIS JUST IN! Today Bill Slawski published a post titled "Move Over Google Author Rank; Make Way for Authoritative Rank" in which he discusses a recent update to a Google patent that seems to confirm that Google may indeed be working toward what I speculated in this post.
That is, the ability to "score" authors as being authoritative on a topic based on various signals from the web, including social media, and potentially rank their content higher for users making a query about the topic in which they are an authority.
It's probably helpful to separate out the notion of "Google Authorship" as a formal program of markup that Google used to identify and visually reward authors with "authorship" in general at Google, which is the ability for the search engine to identify who has written a particular work.
When Google killed Google Authorship, it absolutely did not kill authorship in general -- or Author Rank -- if you prefer. In fact, as I wrote the day the Google Authorship announcement came, the overall authorship aspect remained:
"Google told us that dropping Google Authorship shouldn’t have an impact on how the In-depth articles section works. Google also said that the dropping of Google Authorship won’t impact its other efforts to explore how authors might get rewarded.
How can all this be, when Google has also said that it’s ignoring authorship markup?
The answer is that Google has other ways to determine who it believes to be the author of a story, if it wants. In particular, Google is likely to look for visible bylines that often appear on news stories. These existed before Google Authorship, and they aren’t going away."
It's been some time since I've noticed a In Depth section with authors in Google search or authorship callouts in Google News. But Google made it clear these don't depend on markup.
So -- yeah, I guess you can all leave the markup in, if you want, just in case that Google decides they want to revive that aspect of determining authorship. But Google might just as easily continue to use what they've said they've been doing, looking for other clues on a page to authorship.
I think that's also the bigger point. It's pretty easy to understand how search engines would want to identify authors -- with easily spotted bylines. Those are pretty typical and often shown in standard ways. If you care about authorship and benefits that might come from it, have bylines. Publications may forget to tag things, but publications that care about authors don't forget bylines. That's why search engines may tend to trust those.
Danny, if your read my article you'll see I pretty much agree with you ;-)
You also should check out Bill Slawski's blog today. I linked it in one of my other comments here. He has news about an update to one of Google's author authority patents that reinforces what you and I have been saying.
I really hope Google does bring this back. Just like video snippets it just needs to be stricter with how it is used. Niche bloggers who work hard at their great content can really benefit from this sort of exposure.
I think if Google reverts with following the '10x Content Creator' framework that would not be a bad thing at all, rather could able to create a competition among authors to generate rich content. Then, the authors will feel how to strive meeting minimal content quality, so enter 10x content club. So, I appreciate your nice post forecasting the Google Authorship Issue.
Couldn't agree more, Swapan. One of the more positive signs many of us in this industry see from Google in recent years is that they are getting better at doing things that actually reward what they have always said we should be doing. They certainly aren't doing that perfectly, but it's good to see them headed solidly in that direction.
@Ali , Your comment proves that why Google updates their content algorithm.
I really hope it is brought back - and transparently on top. I have this dreamy, rose-coloured, ivory-toweresque dream-vision of total attribution: Pages being ranked on actual merits, competence, links outwards with clear references to sources etc. Yes, there is a strong influence of academic citation practice in this vision. Ultimately, though, also reader (customer, visitor, whatever) benefit: When sources are clear, nonsense and non-backed-up idiot tales will get a harder time.
I never removed authorship markup for what I worked at. I justs topped caring or paying much attention. I think it could be a powerfult tool, though - not even speaking SEO but rather for expertise building ... and finding(!). Maybe one day we will not search for websites but for experts ... only the top 10 benefitting? SEERP (Search Engine Expert Result Page), here we go ;). Maybe the next iteration of Google Authorship discards URL search but introduces the human niche experts.
I guess it will be some time till then if this ever appears (what with data protection etc.). Interesting thoughts, though. Firstly, authorship markup of some kind would need to really be implemented by a large enough share of websites. (Strike websites; enter authors!) Or: the algorithm for that would need to become much more advanced and more powerful, just as Mark said in the last comment. So many things one can still change and personalize about search results.
If its true so its good news for all,Google authorship is good for online reputation .and its very popular functionality for online marketing .Thanks to Mark who explain points on this topic .i rally like discussion related video of Hansson and Matt Cutts
That's a great article Mark, Google discontinued the authorship markup because a lot of spammers arose and tried to game rankings/CTR by using this schema the reason as you say will always be a challenge for Google. But somehow, my gut feelings suggest that they would most likely continue it back in some time and they would be rewarding the authorship snippet to selective folks/blogs only. There was already a report covered by Barry when they changed the markup from rel=author to rel=agent in the webmaster blog. I think somehow Google is quite protective in this case and in they end they would most likely be allowing this markup in the mainstream search results.
I hope they do bring back authorship. It was an algorythm that a lot of people I think missed out or even realised was happening! As someone who has been working towards getting their material out there to the public more and more over the years authorship is something I feel is important, namely as it brings a sense of status against an individual and also it means then that other users who enjoy the work of those people can easily find their work to read more, especially when they write in several different places like myself!
As I said in my post, I think it's wishful thinking to dream that Google will ever bring back Authorship the way it was. For better or worse (but probably better for the search user), any future Authorship will probably benefit only the top authors in a topic.
Therefore, the best thing you can be doing is to strive to become one of the top recognized experts in your niche, and work hard to build a fanatically loyal audience for your content. But as I say in my conclusion, doing that will benefit you apart from any Google Authorship!
Thanks for the recap going back to 2011.
Wow, looks like it's the content route for people that want to get ahead. Whether it's the knowledge graph or Authorship 2, it seems that you need to be a "10X" content producer. (I wouldn't mind reading an article on the traits of a 10X content producer).
SEO doesn't really play into that, does it? I think social sharing will do you much better than the manipulation that it requires.
If Google were to rollout a new version of Authorship I suspect it'd be more tailored to their local SEO efforts.
Thanks for reading, Greg!
As to your question about whether SEO "plays" into 10X content, I'll refer you to the excellent Buzzsumo/Moz study published here recently. They found that there is a rarely-achieved but possible "sweet spot" of content that gets both large social sharing and lots of links. And guess what....that content looks very much like what Rand describes as 10X content.
Wouldn't it be nice if they brought back the author avatar back in to SERPs? I doubt that will ever happen, but connecting your site and Google + / Business page definitely wouldn't be a bad thing.
That was one frustratign thing for me.
I saw a lot of SERPs with ten faces watching me - mostly in a green background with a small arrow to the Snippet title. I stole my focus. I wont like to see faces again in SERPs - spoken as Google User.
I really liked Google Authorship for several reasons... I am baffled as to why authorship ended. I am a firm believer in accountability online... in as many cases as is possible. Attaching authorship to content I had created on my web site and then posting a link to this content on G+ made me feel safe from content hackers. Maybe it was a false sense of security but it felt like a realistic way to own the content and get credit for being the original poster.
In High School and College classes they teach kids to cite their sources... I see top listings on Google for articles and content with NO author and No sources. I thought this was a huge disservice for Google to feed web users content that was basically made up with bogus facts and spun content from other writers. In order to clean-up the web, authorship put a name and face to content making authors accountable to what they posted online. This could have been a huge blow to spammers who churn out garbage content. I would have liked to see Authorship got to a level higher... a required authorship tag in order to be considered for Google ranking.
That's my 2 cents...
I think Google will be taking back this as it doesn't seem they are keen to hold this feature anymore.
I'm agree, Google Should bring it back. Could not be a bad thing for us, we do a lot of effort on the right blog
Hi Mark, Perfect timing. I was just asking myself this question the other day. I was thinking about Majestic's "Trust Flow" and it made me think about Google's Authorship and whether we would see it return. My bet was that it would since in principle it is a solid idea. I didn't know about the fact that author's had trouble correctly tagging their work. I know I thought it was complicated. From your update it looks like G might have a simpler way. Great news.
At best, I think rel=author is a simpler, but more limited way to do data markup. Articles should already be marked with authors. Facebook already links the name of an author of a shared article that uses the Open Graph Protocol.
There's no reason Google couldn't be doing the same with websites that are already implementing it. Or better yet, since they seem to prefer Schema, why not request "Person" markup in the head section of all articles for this very reason. It would also allow them to better understand the page with the potential for added data.
To put it in other words, there's already a well-used standard of "authorship" that seems to be working pretty well. Why bother with Google authorship unless as a much simpler alternative as far as code goes.
Hi Ethan,
I think the problem is with depending on markup in general as a way for search engines to get accurate data from websites at scale. I believe schema markup is a temporary, transitional solution, simply because there will never be a time when any but a small minority of sites bother to use it.
So why is Google using schema markup and encouraging its use for now? The only answer I can come up with is that it provides training wheels for the algorithm. They can use the minority of sites that do have correct schema markup as a baseline against which to test the increasing accuracy of the knowledge graph using machine learning to identify entities without markup.
Hello Mark,
Google Should bring it back. I still put authorship in my blogs.
Do you think this is something they could implement into Twitter like they did to Google+ back then???
Well, they don't own Twitter (yet) ;-)
I agree, everything evolves and just because the initial attempt didn't provide the desired results doesn't mean that Authorship is dead. Authorship helps immensely for accreditation, so this is simply an "adjustment" to something that probably has been in place much longer than we realize. I'm sure we will hear more from "Authorship" even if it's under a different name.
I believe that Google launched "Authorship" in a self-serving effort to attract an erudite audience to Google+. They knew that associating authors with their content might be valuable information but they were not prepared to do that. Now, they are making noise with a patent application. If they really want to do this right, the author should be able to connect his content to his best biographical page, where ever that exists on the web, rather than to a property owned by Google.
Did they hope that Authorship would drive more Google+ use? Sure. But I don't at all share your suspicion that that was all it was about. It makes abundant sense for Google to be interested in respected, authoritative authors for search quality. Authorship I was a three year trial attempt at doing that. It ultimately "failed," but I put failed in quotation marks because I believe they learned tons from the experiment.
Google will always confuse SEO folks with its manipulating tactics, I think the authorship markup still works but they might have lowered down its value for now
I think that Google autorship is a great a idea to solve the copy content's problem. Actually this tool are not implemented in the best way, but in a future not far away we will can enjoy it!
Thank you for the post Mark!
You are right mark
hope google will bring back authorship
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hope google will bring back authorship
Why Is It Dead?
Great article, Mark! Thanks for sharing your insight.
Mark: "so if more people were using rel=author you might use it again?"
Gary: "that would be safe to say, yes"
Maybe they should have incentivised it more then. Or, y'know... not give people the impression that we should just abandon it, or forget to include it on new websites. Who's going to pick it back up again, if there's no reason to? It's one thing to leave it in, it's another to run around evangelising it with nothing but blind faith in your back pocket.
Author rank could be powerful to Google if more websites used it than before. But whatever.
Authorship is dead, long live Schema.
Hi Silkstream,
As I stated in my post, my reasons for why I believe there is not much to get excited about in Gary Illyes's statements are similar to yours. The purpose of my post is to say that the concept of author authority probably isn't dead, but we need to look elsewhere for that which will resuscitate it.
"...almost anyone could get highlighted just for having used the tagging on their content and having a Google+ profile. As I stated above, I think Google saw that doing that was a non-useful skewing of the results, as more people were probably clicking on those rich snippets without necessarily getting a better piece of content on the other end."
You hit the nail on the head right there, Mark.
Here's an experience I had with authorship snippets:
Back in 2013 when researching multiple adult queries, some sites had authorship snippets in place with attractive women as their profile pictures. Some even got past authorship face filters and had profiles pictures of women in not-so-professional poses/clothing.
Due to the niche, those sites must have been getting an INSANELY high CTR compared to their competitors while not necessarily providing a better piece of "content" on the other end.
Thanks Chris. Back during Authorship I we were constantly finding examples of bad stuff slipping through the cracks like that. Your story underscores the difficulties of trying to do something like this at massive scale while depending on user cooperation.
Hello,
I just put my authorship in my blog
Carme
Interesting, seem like this was a Google ploy to strengthen Google+.
One of these features that leave you perplexed when you begin to think about why they might remove such a great UI aid, functional feature, and especially since it promotes social and Google+ which is barely hanging in ther
Google should have this feature back, it was a way of saying that the content belongs to us.
Firstly the primary reason Authorship (rel=author) was discontinued by Google was that the vast majority of websites did not implement it. It however has the potential to add to the process of identifying quality content if sufficiently high enough percentage of websites implement it. Hence I think that if this happens Google may bring Authorship back.
Joseph,
Thanks for providing a tl;dr to my post ;-)
How likely though, realistically, do you think it is that there will be any sizable move by webmasters to restore or start using rel=author? I see it as highly unlikely, and I think Google does too.
Mark,
I too think that it is unlikely. Unless of course Google brings out something like the mobile friendly algorithm update and websites were forced to be mobile friendly
Thank you @Mark!
Thanks for your comment Ali,
I mentioned the personalized form of Authorship (and Publishership) still at work in personalized search in my article (see the What Will Authorship Look Like in the Future?). However, the Google+ profile and page avatars we see in personalized search (both desktop and mobile) have nothing to do with markup on one's site. This is completely self-contained within Google+. That is, if someone (or a page) in your Google+ circles has posted a Google+ post that is relevant to your search query, and you are logged in to your G+ account, Google may elevate that Google+ post to your page one of results, and give it an Authorship-style rich snippet.
Hey Ali please don't copy the comments from other article. Here is the article from which you copied the comment "https://goo.gl/hjpNnb". We're here to gain the knowledge and solve the queries. And here you're copying the comments. Please don't destroy the image of MOZ.
Why would someone copy a comment like this? The mind boggles!
I thought you are a good contributor Ali, why do you need to copy and paste the comments? I request to Moz, especially to Erica (Sr. community manager) please moderate the comments before making them live..We are noticing since 2 months that many unknown people making fake accounts and posting unwanted comments and doing spam..
PLEASE MAKE MOZ SPAM FREE.....