meta author

Specifies the author of the page or document — a weak E-E-A-T signal but rarely used by search engines.

The meta author tag was historically used by search engines to identify document authors but is now largely ignored by Google. It does not directly affect rankings or indexing. However, it can be useful for content management systems, RSS feed generators, and as a human-readable authorship signal.

For E-E-A-T purposes, proper author attribution is far better achieved through: a visible author byline on the page, an author bio with credentials and links to their profiles, Person schema markup on the author page, and a consistent author page linked from all their posts. These signals are readable and verifiable by Googlebot; the meta author tag is not.

Some academic and documentation platforms still use meta author as part of their metadata standards (Dublin Core). For most websites, skip this tag and invest in visible, verifiable authorship instead.