Google's Author Tag

[Trivum]

Has anyone heard of Google's author tag?

This week Google announced support for “authorship markup” which will help the search engine connect its users with authors through the content those authors publish on the web. Google will ultimately use the data to help its users find content from specific authors directly within the search results but it could also help Google rank search results.

Google's Author Tag

Some of the positives from this seem fairly obvious (if someone finds one of your articles/videos, etc. through search, it may be easier to find others ... no matter where they are).

Does anyone see any negatives right off the bat?

[esdavis]

Not sure about this one. It appears that unless you're running a lot of pages where authorship on a site is key, like a magazine site, it has limited use. It appears that it only operate on links on pages authored by a person where you link to a profile on the same site.

Although I may be mis-reading it.

However, the reference in the article to microdata being supported now is interesting. I've read a little about this elsewhere and it may become a useful tool for organizing information on lots of websites.