Don’t Randomly Change The Author Name, Use Author Annotations & More

Google’s John Mueller was asked about the impact of changing the author’s name on an article. John gave three pieces of advice in response to the question, (1) use author annotations, (2) rewritten content should use the new author’s name and (3) do not randomly change author names.

This was posted on Mastodon where the question was “If I change my existing article’s author profile, is it may affect my SEO? I want to change the name of the author and all the things.”

John did not say yes or no, but he replied “I’d use the author annotations to specify the primary author of the content on a page. If someone rewrites the content, use that name. Don’t randomly change the names, that doesn’t help anyone.”

I mean, seriously, use the author’s name that wrote that piece of content. Why try to trick Google? Why play games? What am I missing here?

Why are you changing the name of the author to someone else if that person did not write that piece of content? Only change it, if that new person updated the piece of content in a significant way.

Don’t say you won’t update the author when it makes sense to update the author out of fear of losing Google search rankings.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.