With all the E-A-T discussion, a lot of SEOs are into building up the authority of the authors that write on their sites. But what if your authors don't want their names out there? Asaf Bernstein asked John Mueller of Google about using the authors real name versus a pseudonym and John said "I doubt Google's algorithms would judge the "real-ness" of author names that you use."
This was posted on Twitter but the additional interesting point was that while Google might not have an algorithm to determine if the name of the author is real, John said "Users might" figure it out or care. Again, an important distinction here about algorithms detecting specific E-A-T related facts versus how users react to a site or content that helps Google determine this?
Here are the tweets so you have it within the context:
Totally up to you -- I doubt Google's algorithms would judge the "real-ness" of author names that you use. Users might though.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 18, 2019
Do you think Google knows if an author is real or not or using their real name?
Forum discussion at Twitter.