Will Google be evaluating the use of rel='author' moving forward?

Will Google be evaluating the use of rel="author" moving forward as more sites use the feature on generic, non-article/news pages, such as the home page or an about page?
Mike Wilton, Corona, CA

Learn more about author information in search results:

[CurtisWorthington]

Nice to see there is movement on this as it's been rumored for quite some time now. Thanks Matt.

[jrswab]

I started using this on my blog a few days ago. Thanks for this video GoogleWebmasterHelp.

[MikeWilton]

Huge thanks for answering this Matt! Only bummer is that context was lost. I was hoping to hear if the use of rel=author on non-authored content (e.g. home pages, about pages, product pages, etc.) would be further evaluated as a spam signal.

[LauraPazzaglia]

Great quote about moving from "strings" to "things"! Ciao, L

[CraigHamiltonParker]

Problem is that anyone can call themselves an 'author' without going through the long and arduous process it would normally take to get published. Google appears to be unable to recognise quality. Quality equates only with popularity so for example a YouTube video of a cat on an escalator will get more exposure than a true work of art. rel=author should be able to adress this.

[spookseo]

rel=author is totally worth jumping on the bandwagon with. Big jump in click-throughs from the search engine results pages, for very little effort. Big win!

[HowardHowell]

Web Authorship should be one of your most desired accomplishments if you are in a position of influence in marketing to any niche. I hope Google keeps and even expands on it. I like the verification process and hope it will eliminate a lot of the non-authentic and spam postings that are getting search results.

[texxs]

Your doing fine as is. Remember, Matt's job is to try and convince you to do what's best for GOOGLE, not for you, your website or your business.

[CraigHamiltonParker]

We need a special Google Plus system for real authors - people who have been published in the real world.... like me!

[waldmanido]

Thank you Matt for this video.
In this video, you mentioned a topic which is pretty important, but has not been dealt with yet: I am refering to your remark about the importance of athorship to forums etc.

In the current state it is not possible to mark forum users as contributors, nor can we do that with commentars reviewers etc.
I would love to hear of any development in this area.

[JohnEdelson]

This is an important question for a lot of us. I was just looking around for what to do. We have just set up LinkedIn pages for our company but I'm trying to figure out what to do with our Google Identity in terms of "authorship."

On a separate note, is Google Authorship automatic when we use blogger? I think yes. But we also have a number of major sites where we use wordpress as our CMS.

[ChetanBhasin]

Even I found it unfair initially, but then think about it... Google has to use some social account or some record to recognize the author and when it's about Google search why not use your Google account!
You can already link to your social profiles to your websites and vice versa with many social networks, but when it comes to Google search, I don't think we should be having much problems with G+ profiles.
I tried the recent upgrade in G+ and believe me it's much better than what it began with.

[bobwilson]

The determination of what is quality is subjective and being an author frequently has nothing to do with quality.

[LoungeVstudio]

Hi Matt, here is what I was thinking and believe me it does make sense. Instead of G+, I wish we could use our Youtube identity. Do you think this would be possible in the future? Thanks

[SouvikMallick]

Authorship has more role to play in upcoming updates, no doubt it can boost your CTR from search traffic but in long run it will be mingled with AuthorRank and help google measure quality for your new content.

[MrTVTL]

While I get the philosophy behind rel="author", it always was a bad idea. Fake "social media" profiles are created all the time, and many of the best pieces of content on the web are created by those who toil, and prefer to toil, in relative anonymity. To reward those who place a profile on a Google+ profile doesn't make sense, because it has no real bearing on relevance.

I get that spammers can still toil in anonymity, but as Google improves its algorithm, that's less and less of a factor.

[MikeWilton]

Have you considered using rel="publisher"? This should give you the opportunity to leverage brand.

[texxs]

Yes, we expect a search engine to be vendor neutral.

[iDrMithun]

What about a brand/company/institutions which is having a page ?

[joshhoffman]

Will there ever be a way to set up Google Plus Pages for businesses with authorship to help establish a business as an expert in their industry? For instance, if a business has a blog or article that they want to be "authored" under the business name rather than an employee.