Google's trust in signals controlled by site owners and SEO specialists

Google's Gary Illyes answered several questions about authorship, providing important insights on issues that are directly under the control of site owners and SEO professionals. This provides a better understanding of what to focus on when optimizing a website.

“Uhm… I don’t know of such plans and honestly I’m not very excited about anything along those lines, especially not one that is similar to what we had back in 2011 to 2013 because pretty much any markup that SEOs and site owners have access to will be in some form spam.” - Gary Illyes

Gary Illyes noted that Google's experience with SEO-controlled data on a web page (markup) tends to become spammy (implying its unreliability). This is important because many in the search marketing industry believe they can manipulate Google by using fake author profiles, reviews that try to look realistic, and metadata (such as titles and meta descriptions) that are specifically designed to rank for keywords. 🚀

• 📌 Authorship signals can be important for ranking, but they are not essential.
• 📌 Metadata controlled by the site owner or SEO specialist can be unreliable and spammy.
• 📌 Google may not trust signals controlled by SEOs or site owners.