Does Author Authority Affect Your Google Ranking?

Does Author Authority Affect Your Google Ranking? If you had a minor medical problem, like a clicking jaw, where would you turn for help? The internet is an excellent resource for finding solutions to annoying problems like this one. When you’re looking at your search engine results, you might find that you’re drawn to the pages written by experts in the field over those written by a guy who runs an e-commerce blog. This isn’t to say that the e-commerce blogger’s pages don’t have correct information – but it’s unlikely that they know more about the topic than somebody who has spent years studying it and working in the field. When you’re looking for information, it’s just a fact that you will go to a source that has been written by somebody with experience.

As we all know, credibility is more important than ever in today’s landscape of misinformation. And while most authors are well-intentioned, there is a lot of harmful information out there. Whether this inaccurate content is due to malice or ignorance, it can do a lot of damage.

That’s why author authority, or author rank, is taken into consideration in the search engine optimization process. Let’s look at whether this can affect your search ranking.

Is Author Authority a Google Ranking factor?

One of the main things that Google looks at when determining the quality of a webpage is E-A-T. This stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. If you want your webpage to rank well, it’s important to make sure that it meets these criteria

But how important are the E-A-T credentials of the author? Does it make a difference if the article was written by an expert as opposed to a recent journalism graduate?

The role that author authority plays in site rankings has long been debated by SEO experts and digital marketers alike. Let’s take a closer look at this concept that has been around for years.

The evidence shows that Author Authority is a Google Ranking Factor

Although Google has never stated that an article’s author has a direct impact on rankings, this doesn’t mean that it can be ignored completely.

There is evidence that Google is interested in identifying authors. Back in 2005, Google filed a patent for Agent Rank. This was designed to help identify and remove low-quality content from the search results. By allowing the search engine to use digital signatures, Google could rank articles based on reputation.

In 2011, Google confirmed support for authorship markup using the rel=”author” tag. However, the adoption of this tag was slow, with only 30% of authors using it by 2014. Then, Google officially removed the tag that same year.

At the 2016 SMX conference, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes said that Google has systems to recognize who created a piece of content, though they are not currently using authorship. This seems to be a reference to the role authors play in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

The Knowledge Graph is a powerful database of facts and entities that Google uses to understand the relationships between things better. Google recognizes authors as official entities, but the search engine doesn’t know about every content creator.

The reputation of an author definitely matters, but you have to be careful not to conflate that a good reputation means the same thing as being an expert or being authoritative.  

Google uses factors such as expertise and authoritativeness to help determine how reliable a source is on a given topic. On the other hand, reputation is often a more subjective evaluation based on how readers feel about the author.

The Search Quality Raters Guidelines are a set of principles used to train human raters who evaluate the search engine’s quality and sometimes test proposed changes to search algorithms. These guidelines help to ensure that people have a positive experience when they use the search engine, which in turn helps to protect and improve your reputation.

According to one of Google’s quality guidelines, a low content creator score can lead to a low-quality rating for a piece of content. However, Google has been clear that these human-generated ratings are never used to influence query results.

Google recently filed a patent for Author Vectors, which allows them to better identify the authors of unlabeled content. This is done by taking into account different writing styles, expertise, and interests in various topics. 

Besides, the search engine giant hasn’t been forthcoming about how or why they’re using this program to determine search rankings, but it has been evident in its recommendations for adding author URLs to article schema. Having this information will allow Google to provide better search results and create a more personalized experience for users.

It’s not always clear what this URL should direct to, but it’s most commonly used to send readers to a social media profile or bio page. 

The Final Verdict about Author Authority

There’s been a lot of debate about whether or not author authority plays a role in Google search results, but unfortunately, there’s no clear answer. 

However, even though it might not directly impact your organic rankings, it’s still a good idea to follow Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines. 

Why? Because users care about the reputation and relevance of a piece’s author. And that’s reason enough to seek out the best possible authors and identify them in each article.

Summing Up

We hope you enjoyed our article on does authority affects your Google ranking. We know that there has been a lot of speculation about whether Author Rank is a ranking factor, and we can certainly understand why this would be an important topic to discuss.

Although there’s no clear answer to this factor, it’s still a good idea to follow Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines. 

If you have any further questions about Author Rank, please contact us anytime at EverRanks. Thank you for reading, we are always excited when one of our posts is able to provide useful information on a topic like this.