Lily Ray asked John Mueller of Google what does one do if the author of a piece of content does not want their name on the content because of fear of being harassed or worse. Should you leave the author byline off or will it hurt that page in terms of ranking.

Here is Lily’s question and it is sad to see some people are afraid to put their name on content they believe in. But this is the world we live in.

Next question for @JohnMu since I’ve been asked many times by clients:

How should publishers handle E-A-T best practices related to revealing author names and bios, if doing so puts the author in danger?

Some authors receive death threats and prefer to publish anonymously.

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) September 15, 2021

John responded that it is basically best to have the author byline on the articles because users will trust it more but you can do what you must do.

It’s not a requirement to add author names, but it is a good practice. If you can’t do it for all content, so be it. If you can’t do it for any content, and it’s all basically “trust us”, then I don’t know how users are supposed to deal with that.

— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) September 16, 2021

Some might make up an alias for the author to protect them but would that help or hurt with trust?

Forum discussion at Twitter.