Is rel=author markup still beneficial for SEO?

What was the original purpose of rel=author markup?

The rel=author markup allowed a web content to be linked to a Google+ profile, displaying the author's photo and name directly in search results. The goal was to enhance content authorship and build a trusting relationship between readers and creators.

Google aimed to combat spam by giving more weight to content signed by identifiable and credible authors. This approach was intended to favor recognized experts whose history of quality publications reinforced the authority of their new content.

Why did Google abandon this feature?

The statement is straightforward: Google no longer uses this signal. The official reason relates to low adoption rates and technical implementation problems encountered by publishers. Many sites never properly configured the link between authors and Google+ profiles.

Furthermore, the shutdown of Google+ as a mainstream social network rendered this system obsolete. Without a centralized platform to host author profiles, the mechanism lost its technical backbone and strategic importance for Google.

Does this mean the author's identity is no longer important?

Absolutely not. The abandonment of the technical markup does not diminish the importance of human expertise in the algorithm. The E-E-A-T guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) place the author at the center of the qualitative evaluation of content, particularly on YMYL topics.

Google continues to analyze author signals through other means: mentions in content, biographies on the site, external citations, reputation on other platforms. Authorship remains a fundamental concept, but its identification now relies on more sophisticated and less standardized methods.

• Rel=author markup and Google+ profiles are no longer utilized by the algorithm
• The author's expertise remains a key E-E-A-T criterion despite the technical signal's abandonment
• Alternative identification: Google uses contextual signals (biography, mentions, external reputation)
• SERP Impact: the rich snippets displaying the author's photo have long disappeared
• No penalty for keeping the markup, but no direct SEO benefit either

Does this statement end all forms of SEO authorship?

No, and this is where Google's discourse becomes deliberately vague. The statement confirms the abandonment of a specific technical mechanism, but says nothing about how the algorithm currently identifies authors. It shifts from a structured signal to much more opaque semantic and contextual analysis.

The Quality Raters Guidelines continue to emphasize the importance of identifying who wrote the content, their level of expertise, and their legitimacy to handle the topic. This apparent contradiction between the abandonment of the technical signal and the maintenance of qualitative requirements reflects a shift towards less binary evaluation methods, likely based on NLP and multi-source reputation analysis.

Do field observations contradict this official position?

Partially. It has been observed that sites clearly displaying detailed author biographies, with links to external professional profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter, academic publications), perform better on YMYL queries. Coincidence or causality? [To be verified] with large-scale testing.

Correlation studies show that content by recognized experts in their field, with verifiable external mentions, achieves better rankings than anonymous content or that attributed to ghostwriters. Google denies using these signals directly, but the performance gap remains statistically significant in certain verticals.

What are the remaining grey areas?

Google remains vague about how it links an author to their expertise without a structured signal. How does the algorithm distinguish between a legitimate medical expert and someone posing as one? Patents mention analyses of citations, co-publications, and social reputation, but nothing has been officially confirmed.

Another troubling point is AI-generated content. If Google values verifiable human expertise, how does it treat content produced by LLMs without an identifiable author? The statement on authorship predates the explosion of generative AI, and this contradiction has never been publicly addressed satisfactorily.

Should you remove rel=author markup from sites still using it?

No, it is not necessary. The obsolete markup does not penalize the site; it is simply ignored by Google. Removing this code will not free up any significant crawl resources nor improve performance. If your CMS still automatically generates this markup, leaving it in place is not a problem.

However, do not waste time implementing it on new content. Instead, focus your efforts on alternative authorship signals that actually work: rich biographies, links to verifiable professional profiles, mentions of publications or concrete experiences.

How can you effectively signal an author's expertise without rel=author?

Create dedicated author pages with a complete biography, professional photo, links to external profiles (LinkedIn, ResearchGate, publications), and a list of articles published on the site. Google can extract this contextual information via NLP and build an expertise profile.

Use the schema.org Author (different from rel=author) in your content to structure author data. While Google does not officially confirm the direct use of this markup for ranking, it aids in the semantic identification of the author and may influence featured snippets.

What mistakes should be avoided in managing authorship?

Do not create ghost or generic authors. Signatures like "Editorial Team" or "Writing Team" dilute individual expertise signals. Even if several people contribute, attribute primary authorship to an identifiable expert who endorses the content.

Avoid hollow biographies ("Jean is passionate about digital marketing"). Favor verifiable elements: degrees, years of experience, companies, clients, external publications, conference presentations. The more documented the expertise, the stronger the contextual signal.

• Keep or create dedicated author pages with detailed biographies
• Implement schema.org Person and Author on content
• Link author profiles to LinkedIn, Twitter, academic publications
• Clearly display the author at the top of each article, not just in the footer
• Document expertise with verifiable elements (degrees, experience, publications)
• Avoid generic or anonymous authors, especially on YMYL content