The online marketing communities was spurred even more by its possible connection to Googles Agent Rank patent first revealed by Bill Slawski. In this patent Google described a system by which particular agents or entities could be identified scored by their level of authority and that score then be used as a search ranking factor. Since one of the types of agents identified in the patent was a content author the patent rapidly became known as author rank in the SEO community.
The connection with Authorship in particular though came from Cutts and Hansson in Europe Cell Phone Number List the abovementioned Authorship video that Google might someday use Authorship as a search ranking factor. Speculation about socalled Author Rank and whether or not it was on as a ranking factor continued throughout the life of the Authorship program. Throughout that period however Cutts continued to refer to it as something Google might do in the future. You can find my own take on why I believed Authorship was never used as a direct ranking factor here. The first hint that Google might be drawing back from Authorship came at Pubcon Las Vegas in October when Matt Cutts in his keynote.
State of Search address revealed that at some point in the near future Google would be cutting back on the amount of Authorship rich snippets shown by around . Cutts said that in experiments Google found that reducing the quality of those results. Sure enough in early December of that year Mozs Peter Meyers detected a rapid decline over several days in the number of Authorship rich snippets in search results as measured by his Mozcast Features tool. Around that same time Google implemented what I called twoclass Authorship a first class of authors who continued to get the full rich snippet and a second class who now got only a byline no author photo. Finally in August this author was.