Meta Author and Generator Tags: Syntax and Search Use

The meta author tag gives the name of a page author. The meta generator tag names the software that generated the page. Both are standard HTML, but Google and Yandex do not list either tag as one that they use. Add them only if your own tools need them.

Syntax

<meta name="author" content="Jane Doe">
<meta name="generator" content="Frontweaver 8.2">

Put both tags inside <head>. “Frontweaver 8.2” is the sample tool name from the HTML standard.

What the HTML standard says

The HTML standard defines both names:

• author: a free-form string with the name of one of the page’s authors.
• generator: a free-form string that identifies one of the software packages that generated the document.

The standard also says that pages written by hand, for example in a text editor, must not use generator.

Search engine support

Google publishes a list of the meta tags that it supports. The list does not include author or generator. Google says that it ignores meta tags that it does not support. So these tags do not change how Google indexes, ranks or shows a page.

The Yandex list of meta tags that its indexing robot uses does not include them either.

If you want Google to know who wrote an article, Google documents the author property in Article structured data. Google recommends these practices for it:

• List every author that the page shows as an author.
• Give each author a separate author item.
• Add @type and url (or sameAs) for each author.
• Put only the name of the author in author.name.

The generator tag in WordPress

WordPress adds a generator tag to each page through the wp_generator function on the wp_head hook. The tag shows the WordPress version:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress X.Y" />

X.Y is the installed WordPress version. A user note on the same WordPress reference page shows how to remove the tag. Add this line to the functions.php file of your theme, or to a plugin:

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator' );

This line hides the version number in the page HTML only. WordPress also prints generator information in RSS and Atom feeds through the_generator, on other hooks.

What these tags do not do

• The author tag does not prove who wrote the page. Anyone can put any name in it.
• The author tag does not replace a visible author name or Article structured data.
• Removing the generator tag does not update the software or fix a security problem in it.

Other meta tags in this group are the meta description and the meta keywords tag.