Google warns against using fake author information on your content

Google is now warning site owners to not fake author information on your content within the updated creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help document. We previously covered how Google updated that document with more information about main content and how quality is evaluated. But Google also added a new section on faking authorship.

What Google added. Google added a new paragraph under the who, how and why section of that document with the following lines:

• “Avoid using deceptive authorship information.”
• “Fabricating creator profiles (such as by using AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials to make content appear as if it was written by human experts) is a form of deception.”
• “Any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy to both users and our automated quality systems, and is a signal of a low-quality page.”

Here is a screenshot of the newly added content:

Why we care. It is pretty wild right now to see how many fake author profiles are on content written on news oriented sites. This is Google telling us that it finds faking author information to be “deceptive” and “untrustworthy.” Thus, Google may decide that the website quality overall is not high and consider it a “signal of a low-quality page.”