Google’s Gary Illyes: Authorship, Links & Disavows Less Important Than SEOs Think

Gary Illyes from Google gave a keynote and a Q&A session yesterday at PubCon and while the keynote was pretty vanilla stuff, the Q&A did reconfirm a lot of what has been said in the past around authorship, links and disavowing links.

Safe Keynote

First, Gary went with a safe keynote address because often enough folks like me see what people are tweeting about his presentation and I take it out of context and get the message wrong.

“I’m sharing info from Wikipedia so I don’t accidentally share more info than I’m supposed to and get fired”@methode #pubcon

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) February 27, 2023

SEOs taking photos of presos out of context? Never LOL. So @methode got his RankBrain info from wikipedia to ensure he didn’t say anything not public. @methode #pubcon

— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) February 27, 2023

It worked, he basically repeated stuff Google already said, that was referenced on Wikipedia, and stuff we covered at least once here with product announcements.

Authorship & Authors

In short, Google does not give too much weight to who writes your content. So if you get a Walt Mossberg to write a piece of content on your site, just because it is Walt, doesn’t make it rank well. If the content is written well, it will rank well, but by default, just because Walt wrote it, doesn’t make it rank well.

I know, this sounds weird, Walt would not publish anything that isn’t above and beyond what anyone else would write. But if Walt was having an off day, and he published something poor, it wouldn’t rank well because his name was on it.

Here are some tweets covering Gary saying this:

When asked if having a big name author write for your site would help the content rank in search @methode said: “Meh”. #Pubcon

— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) February 27, 2023

Authorship markup may be useful to users (humans), but not to search engines. @methode #pubcon

— Kenichi Suzuki🇺🇦鈴木謙一 (@suzukik) February 27, 2023

Authorship is less important than most people think: @methode @Pubcon #pubcon pic.twitter.com/WQtprMXkvO

— Clark Taylor (@clarktaylor) February 27, 2023

He was saying that if for example, you hire a big name author to write for a little/unknown blog…not as important as most people think.

— Clark Taylor (@clarktaylor) February 27, 2023

Links Importance

Gary also said that links are not as important as SEOs think they are. This is not new, I mean, last November, Google said links are less important these days than previously and links will be less important in the future.

But links are just not as important as SEOs think, he said. Here are some new tweets covering he said this:

You can get top rankings with a single link if there’s no relevant content on the web. @methode #pubcon https://t.co/mdRPoW5yey

— Kenichi Suzuki🇺🇦鈴木謙一 (@suzukik) February 27, 2023

I have documented this in a number of my posts about major algorithm updates. In some verticals, sites with much weaker link profiles are beating behemoths. https://t.co/qB28JNhV79

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 27, 2023

Links are important but not as important as most people think. You can still rank without links: @methode @pubcon #pubcon

— Clark Taylor (@clarktaylor) February 27, 2023

“Links are important, but not as important as people think.” – @methode #pubcon

— Tony N. Wright (@tonynwright) February 27, 2023

Disavow Links

This is a repeat from the 2019 Q&A with Gary, where Gary said disavowing hurts too many sites. He said it again:

Disavowing links are just for comfort. Probably stupid to disavow links: @methode @Pubcon #pubcon

— Clark Taylor (@clarktaylor) February 27, 2023

Discussing disavow files @methode said it most likley isn’t doing anything.

He clearly stated that the number of sites who shot themselves in their foot with these is higher than the number of sites he thought would of benefitted from a disavow file. #Pubcon

— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) February 27, 2023

Gary says he thinks personally that the # of people who shot themselves in the foot with a disavow file is greater than the people who probably need to disavow. #pubcon

— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) February 27, 2023

So there are a few topics that are good reminders for SEOs.

Forum discussion at the tweets above.

Image credit to @RyanJones