Remember back when Google told us that we would forever lose Google Authorship? After this announcement, and subsequent removal of Authorship in August 2014, we honestly thought we’d never see it again. Although there has been no news from Google about Authorship’s return, there are things that make us wonder if there’s a possibility that Authorship could make its return someday.
There seems to be different people who seem to almost hint at the possibility that Authorship could come back sometime. As an example, Google Webmaster Trends analyst, Gary Illyes came out with the remark during his keynote Q&A at SMX East in New York City that he recommended webmasters not remove the rel=author tag from their site content.
The rel=author tag was something that Google used as part of their Google Authorship feature that would potentially display a special author rich snippet in search results for content using the tag.
After making the statement that webmasters shouldn’t remove the rel=author tag from their content, it certainly raised a few eyebrows. Even John Mueller made the same recommendation after announcing that Google wasn’t going to be making use of Google Authorship in search. He had said that leaving the tag in place didn’t do any harm.
There was even a Twitter conversation that Gary Illyes had been a part of where he explained that if there was enough users implementing something, Google might consider using it. Mark Traphagen had asked Illyes that if enough people used the rel=author tag, would Google use the rel-author tag again, and in response, Illyes said, “That would be safe to say.”
In a post by Mark Traphagen on Moz.com, Mark gives us a brief overview of Authorship for those who aren’t familiar with it, as well as his commentary on what all this could mean, and whether we should expect to see Google Authorship making its triumphant return. Check out Mark’s post below!