Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.As of Friday Google has discontinued support for rel="author". It should be dropped.
Patch to follow.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #9 | metatag-n2330823-9.patch | 3.89 KB | DamienMcKenna |
| #5 | metatag-n2330823-5.patch | 3.76 KB | DamienMcKenna |
| #4 | metatag-remove_authorship_support-2330823-4.patch | 4.29 KB | othermachines |
| #1 | metatag-remove_authorship_support-2330823-1.patch | 1.09 KB | othermachines |
Comments
Comment #1
othermachines CreditAttribution: othermachines commentedPatched...
Comment #2
DamienMcKenna@othermachines: Oh, thanks for that!
In order to commit this we'll need an update script to remove records from the database and active configurations, and verify that just removing the tag while configuration is trying to use it won't make the site blow up.
Comment #3
othermachines CreditAttribution: othermachines commentedOf course. Too early in the morning... :P I'll give it a go.
Comment #4
othermachines CreditAttribution: othermachines commentedHere's another patch. I've removed entries for 'author' in both the
metatagandmetatag_configtables, and cleared Metatag cache. Additional clean-up includes deleting entity records from {metatag} table if 'author' is the only tag configured.Is there anything else needed? I patched metatag 7.x-1.x-dev and executed the update on a fresh install after first populating the Author URL field in global configs and on several entities - no problems.
Incidentally, I spotted an error in updates 7025/7027, described here: Issue #2331677: Writing to incorrect table in updates 7025 and 7027. My update function inherited this code and of course it failed silently until I spotted the problem. I'll anticipate re-rolling this patch after this is fixed.
Cheers -
Comment #5
DamienMcKennaRerolled.
Comment #6
DamienMcKennaCommitted. Thanks!
Comment #8
xarabithan CreditAttribution: xarabithan commentedIt's the wrong way! I've just updated the version to 1.0. And I'm very disappointed to see the author tag isn't there anymore. It's right: Google deleted the pictures from the search results. But this means truely NOT Google has deletetd the authorship all together. SEO-experts are even still talking that "author-rank" could be still a ranking factor, even an important factor. However by deleting the rel="author" you've cut off all the websites using this tag from the Google-accounts of the authors . That's *sorry* VERY stupid. There are so much less important tags you've added to this wondeful module. The author-tag should add again as soon as possible to help all the websites using this important feature.
Comment #9
DamienMcKennaI reread the original discussion and concede the point.
Comment #10
DamienMcKennaCommitted. Sorry about the mixup.
Comment #11
othermachines CreditAttribution: othermachines commentedI don't think Metatag should support a tag that has no official backing, even if some site owners are finding uses for it. (Google themselves have said that adoption of rel="author" was low, in any case.)
What is the new specification for this tag? The description on the form field says "Used by some search engines to confirm authorship of the content on a page." What search engines? Are we potentially misleading users here?
If I'm wrong it would be nice to have something to refer to for more information.
In case there is any doubt, Google has dropped support of authorship - completely:
"we treat it like any other markup on your pages" - Google
"we're no longer processing this data" - Google
"authorship markup is no longer supported in web search" - Google
The original announcement:
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8
Comment #13
DamienMcKennaI've released v7.x-1.1, which puts this tag back in there again. I'm going to leave it in for now and will review it again later.
Comment #14
jcisio CreditAttribution: jcisio commentedThis is part of HTML5: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/links.html#link-type-author.
Google just tried to extend it to support G+ profile, but you can use it for other thing, like link to the user/% pages.
Comment #15
othermachines CreditAttribution: othermachines commented@DamienMcKenna: Fair enough.
Alternative help text suggestion: "A link that provides further information about the author for the page. Google no longer supports this tag for use in web search results."
It's possible there should have been more discussion beforehand, but I still don't think the tag belongs here. Metatag supports "commonly used metatags", and this one ceased to qualify when Google dropped its support. That a small number of people use it for other purposes is beside the point.
@jcisio: Lots of tags are part of HTML5. Should we include them all?
Comment #16
xarabithan CreditAttribution: xarabithan commentedSo: publisher ist not necessary, revisit after ist not neccessary (is even ignored by search engines). The tags are still part of the project.
If you familar with some depper seo-issues you will understand that Google has'nt dropped the tag itself, they just won't show the pictures in search results anymore. A big difference! They never said, they won't use Author Rank anymore. You know Author Rank? Google tries to give articles of well known authors of a topic authority for some keywords. And this meens the could get a ranking advantage. Small, but an andvantage. Author Rank - so many seo-experts think - is a new kind of Page Rank and will become more important in future. This nothing has to do with the shown pictures in search results. Its a question of authority for a topic and by an author.
What does this meen for metatags: If you place your Google+-Link in metatags you have a pretty nice chance of getting better searchresults (along with some other things) now and in future.
So what has happend: You deleted all the Google+-Tags (and hard work of bigger websites!) and the authors loose theier authority because there is no longer any relationship found. The author tag is quite easy to set, much easier than a html-snippet (schema.org). And it's impotant to set the relationship to the Google-account. So there is no reason to delete this nice tag. And I won't believe it's hard to keep this tag in metatag project.
Comment #17
othermachines CreditAttribution: othermachines commented@xarabithan
So some as yet unnamed "SEO expert" is claiming Google is lying? Where on earth are you getting this information?
- Google dropped the author photos first (last June), then followed by dropping authorship support altogether. The program is dead.
- Google never used "Author Rank", but only occasionally talked about it.
I know a fair bit about SEO,
including that if you're deeply concerned about Author Rank becoming maybe someday relevant in the future you are likely better off including a byline with what I presume is original, quality content.Edit: not productive to get into a debate about where SEO is going, since that can be a touchy subject and isn't what this is about. I've included the relevant info with sources. Not much else for me to do here. Cheers -