Today at SMX East in NYC Garry Illyes from Google told everyone to keep authorship markup in your source code. In 2014 Google (via John Mueller) removed support for authorship which shook the SEO community in a number of different ways. Most SEO’s and webmasters have removed this markup from their websites.
Google even removed support for authorship (screenshot taken October 1, 2015) and says that it is “no longer supported in web search” according to their documentation.
In case you need a refresher, adding authorship to your website is as simple as adding a tag to the <head> of your website. Just add
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/107140259374220667582" />
and you are good to go! Just remember not to add it site wide if you have a multi-authored blog.
Authorship really shook the search / SEO world for a few years. Certain search results attributed with authorship (and blessed by Google) would be given an image next to the search result:
This is what authorship looked like (or manifested as) in its hay day.(Image 2013)
Google still uses some images in the search results, but only for Google+ posts:
Side note: since Google’s authorship program was removed, Facebook added their own version of authorship.You can find more info about the Facebook author tag here, which is really interesting stuff.
I don’t have a lot more info right now but stay tuned for more as always!
>Google says “jump” and we ask, “how high?”
Well this post is kind-of ironic (and misleading). So we should add it back because a G employee said so?
good point, but why not? what do we have to lose? I am questioning why I ever even removed it.