After his death, should we keep the author tag?

Update of this article of September 1, 2014:

There is a lot of talk about it this week, Google announced last Thursday, via John Mueller, that it was putting an end to the exploitation of Google+ authorship.

This article is directly inspired by the announcement and the comments it has generated.

The documentation that refers to the author tag on the official website as well as the mention in the rich snippet “written by” have already been removed.

The summer of 2014 will be remembered as the summer of the death of the author tag

A video that has become obsolete…

What has been removed and what is still working?

After this announcement, Google also removed most of the tools related to authorship, including the author detection tool on the Google page, the tag test. He also removed the author statistics available on the “laboratory” panel of Google Webmaster Tools.

Finally, he removed the last rich snippet relating to authors in the SERPs (the photo had disappeared at the end of July but there was still a line “written by”).

Despite this removal, Google says that it will continue to support the publisher tag (the one that relates to the company).

This decision ignores all the considerations of the authors while for 3 years Google had imposed it on us as a rewarding element for both sites and people by providing trust and credibility.

And the questions of the day are:

• Why can’t editors sign their articles while publishers/brands will continue to do so?
• Who, the author, who spends several hours on his text, or the publisher, who validates a submitted article, brings more value to the Internet?

In the announcement, John Mueller also claims that Google will continue to use the Schema.org syntax (this markup / micro format allows you to make semantic annotations of your pages). The Schema.org system has long identified the author tag with or without Google+, so this tag remains valid and can be used on your site.

More anecdotally, even if the results no longer show the author of an article, Google still offers the possibility of searching ‘by author’. It’s likely that this feature will disappear in the short term, but it’s likely that Google will continue to improve its automatic author detection techniques.

Using the author tag is still a good way to push engines to identify your writing work.

After having imposed, influenced and promoted the use of this tag directly linked to the creation of a personal Google + account, Goggle, having reached the critical threshold of a number of members of his social network, allows himself to sweep away a tag that had earned its letters of nobility when it was only a marketing tool…

I’m going to miss the pleasure of having the thanks of customers when they saw that their portrait in the SERP had a lot of influence on conversion clicks…

To be read

This article which goes in the same direction on the subject

What do you think?

An article written by Kristof, SME SEO Director, SEO agency, Montreal.