In a Google Webmaster Hangout, John Mueller from Google was asked if having an author bio page is necessary to meet Google’s E-A-T guidelines. Mueller suggested that having an author bio page is more about user experience than a technical necessity.
Authorship Signals
The SEO industry often views Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines as a roadmap for ranking better in Google. This has led to the belief that identifying the author and listing their credentials are essential technical requirements for SEO. However, Google has never stated that author biographies are a ranking signal, and the Quality Raters Guidelines are not meant to represent ranking signals.
John Mueller did not endorse authorship as a ranking signal but instead addressed it as a user experience matter. Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are important factors but not the entirety of Google’s algorithm.
The Necessity of Author Biography Pages
A webmaster expressed concern about their author biography pages not being accessible to Googlebot because they were marked with noindex tags, which instruct search engines not to index a page. The concern was that this might negatively affect rankings. John Mueller clarified that this is not the case.
Here is the question:
"Can you speak to the necessity of E-A-T and author biography pages linked from an article? Should we include the author’s credentials in the article or is linking to their biography through the byline sufficient? If the author bio pages are meta noindex, does this prevent GoogleBot or Google Quality Raters from accessing the pages?"
John Mueller began by trying to define what E-A-T means, struggling briefly to recall the acronym.
Mueller mistakenly referred to the "A" in E-A-T as Authority, although Google’s guidelines consistently refer to it as Authoritativeness.
Here is John Mueller’s response:
"So E-A-T is expertise, authority, trustworthiness, I think… and it comes from our quality raters guidelines, which help us improve our algorithms overall. Worth noting, our quality raters do not individually review websites, so it’s not necessary to optimize your website for them."
John Mueller Downplays Author Bio Pages
Mueller did not suggest that author bio pages are an important SEO factor, instead focusing on their impact on site visitors.
Here is what Mueller said:
"Regarding author pages and expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, I recommend checking with your users. Conduct a short user study for your setup to find the best way to showcase that your content creators are knowledgeable and credible."
Author Pages May Not be Required
Mueller also stated that author biographies are not a technical requirement. This challenges a common belief in the SEO community that not including an author bio could lead to a ranking loss.
Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines have not been made to provide insights into the algorithm, yet they are often treated as such in Google’s Webmaster Help forums.
John Mueller advises that author biographies are not a technical requirement:
"Focus less on the technical aspects of authorship, like specific markup for these pages, and more on quality and user experience by testing directly with your users."
Author Biographies are Not a Ranking Signal?
There is no evidence to suggest that an author biography is a ranking signal. It’s an easily manipulated factor, which makes it unlikely to be a ranking signal. It’s time to move beyond reducing Google’s algorithm to simple technical factors. There is no substantial proof that author biographies are the critical ranking factor some in SEO claim them to be.
