For those who were obsessing about the Google author stuff, you can now not worry about it since Google phased out support for author stuff in SERPS, and has now officially deprecated the rel=author tag. So, you can now move on with more important things in your life. 🙂
Radu and co will likely remove this from next version of theme since no longer used by Google.
So sad, I loved that feature!
Sigh. Me too 🙂
FYI to new and existing Newspaper users; Radu and co have removed rel=author support from the latest version of the theme as of 9/12/14. This is intentional and not an error.
Google no longer has ANY support for rel=author, as they have 100% abandoned any support for it at all.
Google couldn’t really answer me though if it has no impact on google news. It would still make sense here in my eyes, for a couple of reasons. Anyway, their answer was “Leaving it the way it is won’t hurt you”.
It has no impact on Google News, which is why that has also been removed from Google News results (we’ve been in GN since it launched a decade ago as beta). It won’t hurt you, but Google no longer captures the information at all so it’s kind of like the Dublin core tags of old, doesn’t hurt, since you can make any kind of meta tag you want to, but the rel=author is 100% dead as far as Google is concerned.
Here is the official blog post from Google on end of authorship support.
Again, Google has officially stated that rel=author is no longer supported for ANYTHING.
Original announcement of end of support:
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8
They treat it as any markup on your page, but they are officially moving on to full support for the structured markeup, schema.org data, vs their own elements. So, it doesn’t hurt to leave it, but theme devs and YOAST SEO are removing any support for rel=author as it has no benefit for SEO, doesn’t point to anything, and signals between your G+ and blog have no functional value.
