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Back in October, Google's John Mueller told us directly and clearly that authorship is not used for rankings. That has not changed, as John Mueller said it again in a Google Webmaster Help thread yesterday.
John wrote:
Authorship only plays a role with the "in-depth-articles" feature, and otherwise has no effect on ranking in web-search at all.
Yes, in March, Matt Cutts told us that authorship is used for in depth articles but outside of that, Google is not using it.
I should add a caveat that Google has been hinting at working on a good guy algorithm that may use authorship and forms of author or content specific authority to promote web pages. There is a good chance that authorship in this form or future forms, may play a role in rankings. Another point is that authorship may improve your click through rate because of the extra image in the search results.
But for now, authorship, outside of the very edge case of in-depth-articles, has no role in rankings.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Comments:
Michael Martinez
05/20/2014 03:26 pm
And dozens of SEO bloggers are shown to be wrong again. #shocking
interartsllc
05/20/2014 05:34 pm
Maybe not directly, but I would imagine that having an author profile image alongside a serp listing would certainly draw more attention, and result in a better CTR and possibly improved rankings (?)
Diego
05/20/2014 05:42 pm
But why we have to "link" our profesional page with our PERSONAL profile (you know.... stupid post with funny animals, weekend photos, etc....) instead our WEB profile (where we publish things related with our web)...... its a bit stupid to mix personal with profesional...
Nate Baker
05/20/2014 08:19 pm
That's a great question. Does the impact of an authorship photo indirectly affect rankings?
F1 Steve
05/20/2014 09:25 pm
Love the SEO bloggers who manage to somehow rewrite the same LONG article month on month while not actually saying anything.... Looking forward to the next 'social signals' arrival on search engine land!
Michael Martinez
05/21/2014 03:23 am
"That's a great question. Does the impact of an authorship photo indirectly affect rankings?" Agreed.
You All Be Frauds!
05/21/2014 10:28 am
SEO as a form of artificially raising rankings in SERPS is all but dead unless you are a hard core burn and churn spammer. SEO - I mean LINK BUILDING (NOT INTERNET MARKETING) is well dead as a long term ranking strategy. So as far as I am concerned, SEO is the NEW FRAUD gig in town.
Yogita Aggarwal
05/21/2014 11:12 am
Agreed... Though Authorship is not directly showing any positive influence in getting SERP but yes an author image with the ranked link definitely improve CTR of that link.
Michael Martinez
05/21/2014 02:16 pm
"SEO - I mean LINK BUILDING (NOT INTERNET MARKETING) is well dead as a long term ranking strategy." You seriously need to learn the difference between search engine optimization and link building.