Has Meta Author reports whether a meta author tag appears in the document head — it returns 1 when the tag is present and 0 when it is not. It is a plain presence check: RankGear does not read or verify the author name, and many pages legitimately have no meta author tag at all.
| Factor ID | RG-MET-002 |
|---|---|
| Family | Metadata |
| Measurement | Binary presence (0 / 1) |
| Measured zone | Head HTML without scripts |
What it measures
This factor reports whether RankGear recognizes a meta author tag in the document head. It is a single yes-or-no signal about the tag’s presence, not a judgment of its contents or of the page’s authorship overall.
How RankGear measures it
RankGear takes the script-free head of the document, lowercases it, and checks for the literal sequence <meta name="author. When that sequence is found the factor returns 1; otherwise it returns 0. Because the match is a literal substring, attribute ordering, spacing, and quotation style all affect detection.
What RankGear looks for
<meta name="author" content="Jane Doe">| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 1 | The script-free head contains the literal sequence <meta name="author. |
| 0 | No such sequence was found in the script-free head. |
How to optimize it
Add a meta author tag only when author metadata genuinely supports your publishing model and the tag carries an accurate name. Treat this factor as an observation about your markup rather than a target to force: a 1 is only meaningful when the underlying author value is real and correct, and adding an empty or inaccurate tag serves no one. If author metadata does not fit your content, leaving it out is a reasonable choice.
Important considerations
- Attribute ordering, spacing, and quotation style affect this literal detector — a tag written differently may not match.
- The factor does not validate the author value; it only reports that the tag pattern is present.
- It does not replace visible authorship or structured data such as an author entity in schema markup.
- Many sites legitimately omit a meta author tag, so a 0 is not by itself a problem.
- This is a correlation-based signal within a measured result set, not a cause of ranking — presence of the tag does not make a page rank.
Related factors
Part of the Factors reference · how RankGear measures · glossary.