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Author Byline Question
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What's the best practice for displaying author information at the beginning of an article?
We're presently displaying it as: By <Author> • Jan 16, 2015 • <City>.
We're considering making it even more concise by removing the term 'By'.
Would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we did this? Any other ways we should optimize?
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In addition to what have already been said, I would consider adding rich snippets such as schema.org/author
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I really don't think there's any "right" or "wrong" way to go about this. As Ray said, this is a very, very small aspect of your on-page SEO and shouldn't take up too much of your time in terms of worrying.
When in doubt, ask yourself "will this make sense from my reader's perspective?" On average, if you follow that line of thought, you won't go far wrong.
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I think that the "by line" should be....
Joe Schmoe, Chief Widget Designer at Widgets.com
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I'm curious why you think you would be negatively impacting your SEO by removing 'by' from the line?
I think this falls under a UI consideration, what makes the most sense for your readers. It's a very small aspect to the overall content of the page. I wouldn't worry about SEO impact for this change.
http://moz.com/blog/hacking-keyword-targeting-whiteboard-friday
Checkout Moz's latest Whiteboard Friday post - their byline includes the date, author, and a few categories the article is posted in. The categories are mainly there to allow the reader to easily find other related articles and keep them engaged with the site (move from one article to another article they may be interested in quickly and easily).
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