Google Authorship Markup Disadvantages Everybody Ignores
One of my favourite SEO pundits is AJ Kohn. AJ is an eager early adopter of Google+ and Google authorship markup. That's the thing that lets you display your image in search results. AJ and other people have written numerous great resources on how to use Google+ and the rel=author tags Google has introduced. So I won't tell you much about it. Just read the articles and implement the markup or rather read my post here first explaining the disadvantages of Google authorship markup almost everybody seemingly ignores.
I'm also an avid user of Google+ as you might know. I'm not the best friend of Google as a whole though. I have banned Google search on my blog here as a proof of concept that you can survive and fare well without the search monopolist.
I have added the rel=author tag here on this blog even before I banned Google search on it. I used the easiest way possible, by simply adding a "meta" tag to my HTML head:
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/113621097289093997513/posts"/>
As this blog is mostly me and occasional guest posts I didn't want to make it more complex than that and add an author profile to each post. Now that I do not show up on Google anymore my author pic doesn't either. I tried it so I know how it works at least and what it does. What does it beyond adding an image to search results or rather one search result per search results pages? Not much.
As of now you don't get better rankings on Google besides in social search where you rank a tiny bit better with the image than without as far as I have seen.
Everybody is talking about so called Author Rank though (initially the thing was called Agent Rank but the name didn't stick). The idea behind Agent Rank or Author Rank is in its most simple terms that Google does not rank sites or pages anymore but authors who have written the content on these pages.
Is authorship markup a good thing? For Google it is. For you it depends.
In case you are a frequent user of Google+ and engage a lot with a large number of friends who have similar interests it might have a positive impact in the long run. Also as noted above these people will already see your results a bit more prominently. What happens if you do not use Google+ at all? I recently optimized my wife's website a bit. She was angry at me that I optimize everything else but not her site so I thought I will try to improve it a bit in the few hours I could make time for it.
One of the things I did was to introduce the authorship markup. My wife has a Google+ profile but she hates it and doesn't use it at all. So I fixed it a bit and connected it to her site. What happened? Next time I checked some of her major ranking dropped: her main keyphrase ended up on #7 instead of #3 or #4 she occupied previously for quite a while. This of course might be sheer coincidence. On the other hand it's clear that her ranking did not rise after the addition of the Google authorship markup.
I already thought about removing the rel=author meta tag
but I thought that as she looks quite friendly and is often the only one who displays an image in the search results she might get a higher CTR and more calls by potential patients (she practices Traditional Chinese Medicine). To make sure I added her phone number on top right on each page.
A few weeks later I can say: nothing happened. We don't have more people who call her. You might argue that this evidence is all anecdotal but at least it's first hand. I did not really recommend my clients to use the mark up yet. I won't probably after I didn't work for me and my wife. I also won't connect my other projects to my Google+ profile in order not to hurt them.
You have also to grasp what the Google rel=author tag really means. It's a unique ID for Google to identify you.
In case you are living in the US you might be a little cautious as you do not have unique IDs in the United States. Where I live in Germany a state issued unique ID is obligatory. Guess who has introduced it and when. Adolf Hitler did in the thirties at the time he prepared the Holocaust. The Nazis needed to identify everybody to know who s/he is where s/he lives and whether s/he is an Arian or a Jew. Then those who were identified as Jews had to die in gas chambers.
- Google may kill your rankings depending on what you do on other sites or what other people do on other sites you have contributed too.
- Google may assign your authorship to articles you haven't written without asking you aka automatically, even after your death as has happened with Truman Capote on the New York Times.
- Google might judge your authority based on your Google+ engagement or the lack of it. So in case you are like my wife who does not work online all day and has no time to create and share great content for Google to monetize, Google might decide that other people who are to be ranked higher.
- Google will remember your author history. You may have unnatural links issues today and a perfectly clean site tomorrow but you already will be flagged as an author. Your clients who have used your services as an SEO or webmaster might employ someone else by now who adds some paid links. Google knows that you have been associated with that site and may lower your ranking on your current sites as well. We have seen that Google likes to penalize SEO agencies when their clients fail at complying with the Webmaster Guidelines.
- Google might dismiss your guest articles. Your great guest blogging campaign on dozens of other blogs might fail because Google will count the links all as one as the same author has written all the posts and linked to himself. So maybe the links won't count at all.
- Google might judge you based on the actual image you use. In case the image looks bad, is not you or is NSFW your whole site might disappear. We have seen evidence that Google is monitoring Google Profile pics very closely and censoring them.
Do you see more advantages or disadvantages with the Google authorship implementation? I'm quite disenchanted with Google so I might be biased. Other people don't care that Google is a monopoly, doesn't pay taxes and attempts to replace organic search results with ads.
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These are all interesting points, Tad. I hadn’t thought of a few of them, but I’ve spent some time worrying about others.
Mostly I’m just opposed to the whole forced-engagement thing. And the ‘author rank’ thing, when it finally emerges as something important, might not even make as much sense as what you’ve laid out. Could just be based on sheer preference or even be a nepotism thing.
.. So yeah, I am paranoid, bitter and negative. But I’m a hit at parties!
We do have unique IDs in the US…they are called social security numbers.
Dustin: I’m glad there are people who are even more opposed to Google than I am ;-)
To be honest the authorship idea is quite logical to some extent but in the hands of Google it’s scary.
You can throw away domains but you can’t change your name that quickly so it’s a great weapon to combat spam. Still I prefer the way Blekko does that.
Chris: True, we have those too but in Germany you need to have a so called Ausweis or Pass and carry it around everywhere. It’s biometric. Also you have to go to the so called Meldestelle “register place” and tell the local government where you live. It’s then written on your Ausweis.
I’m not a German citizen so I can’t even go to the library without an Ausweis. I needed an extra paper from the Meldestelle that allowed me to get a library card.
In case the police “catches” you without an Ausweis they can take you into custody just to identify you.
Another disadvantage is that sometimes I see companies use Rel=Author to show the face of their CEO on the results.
This makes me suspect the company is a “one-man band” or if they have a very low amount of G_ followers (which shows in the results) also damages my perception of them.
interesting thoughts, Tad. personally, i’ve held off on marking up my guest posts. it’s interesting to read some of the ways it could be disadvantageous, especially to branding.
Excellent, excellent thoughts. A colleague mentioned another point–you could post a blog as someone else, just grab their Google idea, and set them as a spammer. There’s no way to hide your author id, it’s easy for anyone to steal.
I have a big problem with Google’s ability to track people all around the web with this ID, logins, etc. It’s hypocritical of them to set (not provided) data because they believe it violates privacy, but they have no problem violating ours.
Great post. I’ve spent hours on end optimising one of my websites for Google’s authorship markup. In the end, it’s a very sketchy subject. Best thing to do for now is work to build up a well established Google+ page.
P.S The US have social security numbers as unique identifiers.
Very interesting article! Especially because that what happened to the website of your wife happened to me to…
My rankings dropped with an average of 8 or 9 positions.
But, my main question is off course: Did you manage to get the website back to top positions? And if yes; How!?
I have found from testing that my rankings stayed the same but the CTR increased. Hopefully this stays as is.
Interesting article. I recently implemented rel=author for my site and haven’t noticed anything that changed as far as rankings etc go. I will keep my eye on it though: this article definitely raises some food for thought.
We use it and set the “rel=author” to the admin profile for the site. All we’ve seen is that almost every post makes it to the first page of Google for the title of our posts.
We’ve only been using it actively since the end of October this year, and a lot of our titles are long tail. So, take that for what it’s worth.
[...] With all the Buzz about Rel=Author – here is someone that does not think it’s a good fit… [...]
[...] suggested - fair game, always good to get an alternative view – but I think things like this miss the point. My reasons why are clear in Why I Believe Debating Authors is Totally Moot, while [...]
I do a lot of guest posting on other sites and sometimes find getting an authorship link with some webmasters a little prohibitive.
There’s some sites too where I’d probably prefer not to display my authorship!
I had the issue of it assigning authorship to me that I didn’t want. I have added authorship to my personal site, a hobby site I own, and then the two blogs from my workplace.
At work I distribute content for the search marketing company I’m employed by, and one of these pieces got automagically assigned to me even though I used no author mark-up on the content – just like the many other pieces I get published every week on behalf of our clients.
It was highly frustrating and made me think I’d just remove myself from Google+ and their schemes.
This is the first time I have heard this idea presented and I spend a lot of time reading blogs…
In general, I am a fan of rel=author markup and schema markups that allow a webmaster to customize their search results. The benefit of having a search result that stands out from the rest on the page can impact conversions and click-throughs for the positive.
However, you present some interesting ideas that are a great word of caution. I would argue that most of the worst-case scenario ideas presented are unlikely to come true. You are right that there is a possibility and that possibility may be enough to stop some from utilizing the feature.
I would bet that Google would reframe from going to such extremes because the search community would find out and then would simply stop utilizing features like a rel=author tag. This may mean some major short term losses for those that heavily bought into rel=author, but in general the search world would move on and find the next best thing. I would argue that Google would much prefer to have the data and manipulate it for their gain, than they would attack SEOs with the data.
Since I just posted this article on Twitter, I’ll note that AJ Kohn’s response is here:
https://plus.google.com/115106448444522478339/posts/SxYcq9QHFB2