Google's Gary Illyes: Authorship, Links & Disavows Less Important Than SEOs Think

Feb 28, 2023 - 7:41 am 3 by

Gary Illyes PubCon image from Ryan Jones

Gary Illyes from Google gave a keynote and a Q&A session yesterday at PubCon and while the keynote was pretty vanilla stuff, the Q&A did reconfirm a lot of what has been said in the past around authorship, links and disavowing links.

Safe Keynote

First, Gary went with a safe keynote address because often enough folks like me see what people are tweeting about his presentation and I take it out of context and get the message wrong.

It worked, he basically repeated stuff Google already said, that was referenced on Wikipedia, and stuff we covered at least once here with product announcements.

Authorship & Authors

In short, Google does not give too much weight to who writes your content. So if you get a Walt Mossberg to write a piece of content on your site, just because it is Walt, doesn't make it rank well. If the content is written well, it will rank well, but by default, just because Walt wrote it, doesn't make it rank well.

I know, this sounds weird, Walt would not publish anything that isn't above and beyond what anyone else would write. But if Walt was having an off day, and he published something poor, it wouldn't rank well because his name was on it.

Here are some tweets covering Gary saying this:

Links Importance

Gary also said that links are not as important as SEOs think they are. This is not new, I mean, last November, Google said links are less important these days than previously and links will be less important in the future.

But links are just not as important as SEOs think, he said. Here are some new tweets covering he said this:

Disavow Links

This is a repeat from the 2019 Q&A with Gary, where Gary said disavowing hurts too many sites. He said it again:

So there are a few topics that are good reminders for SEOs.

Forum discussion at the tweets above.

Image credit to @RyanJones

 

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