John Mueller from Google has clarified that the search engine’s algorithms do not consider author reputation when ranking websites. This misunderstanding stemmed from updates to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.
Although Google’s Quality Rater team is instructed to take author reputation into account when manually evaluating a web page, this is not a factor in Google’s algorithms. Furthermore, quality raters themselves do not have the capacity to directly influence a site’s rankings.
Even if a quality rater reviewed a piece of content and noted the author had a poor reputation, it would not affect the page’s rankings.
This issue was addressed in a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout when a site owner posed the question:
“If we have a site with multiple authors and find that one of them has developed a poor reputation, is there a way to remove the author from the site but retain the content?”
Mueller replied, stating that removing an author would be treated like any other site change, without any special considerations.
He further addressed concerns about author reputation by clarifying:
“I wouldn’t look at the quality rater guidelines as indicating that our algorithms explicitly assess author reputations to rank your websites.”
In short, there’s no need to worry about author reputation affecting rankings.
Nonetheless, if you wish to disassociate from an author by removing them from your website, this would be treated as a standard site modification.
The complete conversation can be viewed in the video, starting at the 28:17 mark.
