Remember way back in 2012 when Google authorship was a big deal? Everyone was using Authorship markup. There were rumours of a rankings advantage and you even got a funky little picture of the author in the rankings.

As with anything ranking related to increased, it wasn’t long until it was being misused. Publishers where putting the Authorship tag in everything, not just articles and other appropriate media.

Author Vs Publisher

Google is all about relevance and in true Google fashion they also gave us the publisher tag. This was basically the equivalent of the author tag, but for organisations instead of individuals.

If you want to implement them yourself, here are some example code snippets:

<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/+brettthompson687" />
<link rel="publisher" href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MobiusmediaCoUk" />

Note: Remember to replace the links with your own appropriate Google profiles. Or you may end up with my face next to your article.

So what happened?

Due to a strange combination of lack of use and misuse Google eventually pulled the tag in 2014. Well, now it’s back. You can read more about this and watch the video here. At Mobius, we decided not to pull authorship out of our sites. It’s a meta tag, so it’s not going to cause an issue and despite its effects in the rankings been negated, any extra info that you can pass to the search engine is a good thing in our book.

Not that it’s back, we don’t have to reintegrate it. We can just sit back and watch the rankings become repopulated with pictures of our faces.

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