Is Google Authorship Coming Back?

 
Recent conversations have raised speculation that Google’s authorship may be returning, little over 18 months since it was officially discontinued.

Gary Illyes, speaking at SMX East this year said that webmasters and publishers should leave Google Authorship tags on their websites – what reason would you need the tags for, if not the return of Google Authorship?

Even if Google Authorship doesn’t return in it’s old form, it seems perfectly plausible that the authorship markup is, or at least will be used for some form of ranking or search signals.

Google already loves structured data (see schema.org’s markup) as it helps search engines understand the content, and indeed the context of the content on pages, and is also used to show rich snippets in search results.

So if you don’t already have authorship markup, how do you go about adding it?

Adding Schema.org’s “Person” and “Article” markup is a great way to build up an Author rank, not only will this help Google understand exactly what your content is, and what you’re trying to say, it will also give data to the knowledge graph.

Depending on exactly what your content is, you can let Google know through the schema.org article markup, there are markup categories for news, reports, scholar articles, social media and technology articles – you can find out more about markup properties and see some examples over at Google’s resource page https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/articles

So in short, we’d recommend keeping your Author markup on your content pages (or adding it if it’s not already there), attempt to gain a knowledge graph entry by becoming an online entity – you can work towards this by creating a wikidata.org profile and attempting an article submission at wikipedia.org.

Citations can also help, but ensure they are not spammy, as that will do more harm than good.

Long live Google Authorship (if only in memory!)