From Matt Cutts: “The authorship verification tool is completely passive, so it shouldn’t have any sort of effect like that.”

I will INFER that, if the verification tool can really negatively impact your SERP visibility, more people will have to document this behavior to help Google figure out what is going on.

It sure appeared to be a “bully” move on Google’s part, didn’t it? But wow, it sure got the SEO community to pay attention – if that’s what they (Google) were going for, they certainly succeeded!

However, it’s a common situation in this community. A linkbuilding technique gets hot – becomes a buzz word – has WSO’s sold on it….then it gets abused and Google picks a ‘leader of the pack’ to use as the example to stop doing it or else. Then, it’s on to something else and the cycle continues.

Be interesting to watch as this whole specific situation plays out – a lot of sites received penalties over their use of (or perhaps even association with) MBG.

Enjoyed meeting you as well – thanks for stopping by!

Keep it in the short grass =)

I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. Lately while doing link audits for my clients competitors, I’ve seen a lot of paid links in the way of web directories. To me, Google can’t keep up with everything and eventhough they like to think they have full control, they don’t.

So they used MGB as a whipping boy so to speak as a lot of people know about the service and because Matt and co. have tried to kill guest blogging as a link building method. I think it’s unfair to Anne and the people that used it. After all, go to Fiverr and see how many gigs offer guest blogging. Why not go after them?

Nice to connect with you today as well.

Yep, this is true 🙂 But I suspect if that were mentioned to a Googler they would look at us funny. They _are_ the Internet, didnt you know? 😉

Hiya Riki =)

I have two answers to that….

1 – Google Plus is on a subdomain (plus.google.com) so it needs to build up it’s own authority – and

2 – Google is not the only search engine that uses backlinks as a ranking signal.

In fact, as far as I know, there is only ONE other search engine that is testing not using backlinks as a ranking signal for their commercial queries (Yandex).

At this moment in time, Google is the search vehicle we all want to rank well in – but that may not always be the case. As long as backlinks are a ranking factor, Google Plus will rank well on any search engine, don’t you think?

Hiya Charles =)

Best we can do is keep our heads down and do our best to put out what people want to find.

That makes perfect sense, Lea – I like your way of thinking about it.

Thing is, Google is not the only search engine that uses backlinks as a ranking signal….

Hi Marie =)

That post was a very interesting and insightful read – wish I had found it before all this, but super glad I found it AFTER all this.

What was most interesting to me was the comments on your post. It’s interesting to read what people thought Google would never do, etc and then flash forward to now, and see what Google is actually doing.

I read a lot of your posts while there – really great stuff. Thank you for sharing with the community AND for stopping by here!

Thank you for your in-depth feedback there…and yes, mighty unconventional of you 😉

I’m going to rethink some testing ideas….

Thanks so much for the kind words Jennifer. I wrote that article eight months ago but it makes more sense now that all of these manual reviews are happening on a large scale.

“If it’s a mistake to follow the instructions given directly from Google and then use the tool offered to make sure I did it right, well… I don’t know how to respond to that.”

Rather unconventional criticism from me, is it not? 🙂

However, the last news I had on Authorship (and my information may be out of date) was that the team had been dispersed to other projects, so Authorship is on autopilot and no one is minding the store. Unless Google specifically says somewhere that the tool has been updated to conform with the latest standards supported by Authorship it’s a sketchy thing to use that tool in any experiment.

Your experiment has revealed an interesting point: that the tool can be used to disable Authorship. Imagine how that could be abused by someone who notices that a rival has inadvertently screwed up their markup. It’s a dangerous business, sharing what you discover on the Web because you’re thinking about THIS and THAT occurs to someone else.

But to do your experiment properly you have to keep things simple. Hence, that means NOT using the tool. You should have enough information about how to get Authorship rolling by now that you don’t need to use the tool.

If you just feel better using a verification tool then you should use one that isn’t tied into Google’s processes. While a third-party tool may not be up-to-spec on Google’s internal requirements, either, at least it can’t be used to kill your Authorship.

So, I don’t mean to come down hard on you but you really did make a mistake to use the verification tool. Your intention was not to set up Authorship but to test one aspect of how Authorship works. In any such experiment you have to isolate what you’re testing as much as possible; and that means keeping the experiment as simple as possible.

Meanwhile, let’s hope no one figures out how to use the verification tool to hurt people in a scalable way. I’m afraid the cat is already out of the bag, though.

http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/yes-high-quality-guest-posts-can-get-you-penalized/

I was just following the instructions given by Google here (option 2):

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986?expand=option2

If it’s a mistake to follow the instructions given directly from Google and then use the tool offered to make sure I did it right, well… I don’t know how to respond to that.

One would *think* the tool would be accurate – it was accurate when it said authorship was set up properly on my test site (I saw my pic in the SERPs), so why would the testing tool suddenly be inaccurate when the tool says authorship was NOT set up properly when all I did was no-follow the link?

I don’t have the length of experience online that you do, nor do I have the education background that you do… If I did, this post most likely would never have been written. It all seems to make perfect sense to you, but it just doesn’t to me. My perception at this moment in time is that Google requires a do-follow link to ones G+ profile in order for the Authorship system to work in the SERPs.

Apparently, according to option 1 in that link above, one can validate via a verified email address – which I imagine is what you have done?

All in all, I really don’t think I am alone in my perception of all this – perhaps some clarification would be good all around.

And I don’t have to show where Google says it does NOT have to be a “follow” link. That’s false logic. They are not asking for a “follow” link. And they don’t require it.

I am sure I have tested it in the past and it worked – more fool me for not testing it again before commenting as I know you test stuff a lot more than most.

I just went through a few variations using rel, data-rel and ?rel=author (ignoring the version in header)

rel=”author nofollow” is recognised as rdfa linktype of author, but the authorship relationship isn’t working (at least in the rich snippet tool)

It wouldn’t be unheard of for the tool to have a bug… the is certainly inconsistancy.

Rel=”me” from a historical context always worked with nofollow.

Will play around more with it tomorrow

Left it live on my blog for now
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http://andybeard.eu/contact/

True, why wouldn’t I CHOOSE to endorse myself, but from what I can tell so far, I didn’t have that choice, ya know?

I couldn’t find it literally spelled out by Google, so I decided to try it for myself.

So i put the follow’d rel=author link on the site, ran thru rich snippets tool, authorship set up properly.

Changed rel=author link to a no-follow link, ran back thru rich snippets testing tool, authorship NOT set up properly.

Yes, it’s possible I messed something up, but instead of trusting anyone’s words, I decided to try it and see for myself.

On the other hand, show me where Google says it does NOT have to be a ‘follow’ link…. 😉