Authorship and Aggregate Rating in SERPS
-
I've setup authorship and aggregate rating information for our website. It all checks in the Structured Data Testing Tool, but the results in the SERPs have been on then off. At first my authorship image showed on all articles were the markup existed, then suddenly it went away. Then more recently, the aggregate rating information displayed on all pages were the markup existed, then again, it suddenly disappeared.
I'm curious if anyone knows if the disappearance of these things are the result of manual action from Google or simply because the algorithm gathering more information that would cause the items to stop showing for one reason or another? In both cases the markup didn't change previous to the results disappearing. This leads me to believe the change in the SERPs wasn't a result of the markup, but rather something on Google's side.
-
Hi Gianluca,
If you can describe what types of schema you have seen to be affected by authority, as in my experience setting up fresh brand new sites with authorship seemed to have authorship show really fast?
I did see most if not all the review sites with aggregate reviews in their snippets drop a while back (earlier than August for my case)
-
When it comes to Authorship and Schema (or Structured Data) visualization in SERPs as rich snippet, a big part seems to be played by the authority of the domain.
What does this mean?
That even though the Structured Data Testing Tool is saying to you that everything is fine, if your domain is not authoritative, probably Google won't render any rich snippet.
This possibly is a way for trying fighting the "rich snippet spam" and in the second half of August I saw that many sites, which had aggregate reviews in their snippets, lost them.
Be aware that not having rich snippets doesn't mean Google is not reading the structured data information in your site, and use it for better understanding its content.
-
While I haven't tested this, I haven't heard that you can't have schema and authorship on the same page. Google has been pushing people to do both. So, I can't imagine that they would do something like that. As for authorship and publishership, they are two sides of the same coin and both are supposed to be used, though I think publisher is supposed to be used on the homepage. Even still, I seriously doubt that using one would block the other.
-
From what I have gathered here and on other forums is it's more of an automated algorithm that Google is experimenting with right now, which is why the inconsistencies in displaying these items.
With that, I'm wondering if anyone has tested and found what could be an influence triggering the information to disappear - assuming that it is all setup correctly and verified via the Structured Data Tool. I saw a post were someone said you can't have both Authorship and schema data on the same page. Another said that rel="publisher" on the same page as Authorship could also block the Authorship from showing. Yet another said Authorship authority was why. These seem like guesses more than anything, so I'm curious if anyone had some test data that could back up these claims or possibly shed some light on other factors that could be potentially be affecting one or possibly both items?
-
If the Structured Data Tool shows that your pages are set up properly, I wouldn't worry about it. Google plays around with their algorithm and I've seen authorship images show up next to my SERP listings on and off. I attribute this to Google tinkering, and possibly my personalized search having something to do with it.
I've ran searches for my own content while logged into my Google profile and gotten different authorship results than when running a de-personalized search.
-
I agree with Vadim. There's constant fluctuation in the authorship and the schema stuff. Google's still trying to figure all that out. The only manual potentially manual action I've seen Google take related to authorship is if the author's image isn't a faceshot.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
I've seen this personally happen to me, and my guess it is something on Google's side as they are trying to fiddle around with what information best to display from your site to SERPs. I'd love to hear others experience with this as well.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SERP result (URL) doesn't change after a 301
A couple of months ago there was a result in Google for our branded search term which wasn't the 'official' URL, actually the result shown in the SERP was www.mycompany-ip.nl. We've applied a 301 redirect of this URL to the 'official' URL which is a subdomain: department.mycompany.nl. From Google the redirect is obviously working, but up until now, I don't see Google replacing the incorrect URL by the correct URL. I am wondering what to do to make the result correct. André
Technical SEO | | ConclusionDigital0 -
Old URLs Appearing in SERPs
Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server. We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to. Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting. When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s. We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain. We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input. Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress). This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise. Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days. Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories. Thank you. Rosemary One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB3 -
Google Displaying wrong URL but correct page title and description in SERPS
Hi. Our second highest performing page on Google is messed up in the SERPS. This is our login page. It always ranks high. It still does, but the URL is incorrect. Google is referencing an old redirect that was for a one off campaign from January 2014. This page has long been redirected. But now the vanity url for this page is what is displayed in Google. The link goes to our login page but once you log in it redirects you to a page saying the offer has expired instead of your account details. This is a huge issue for us. Can anyone shed some light? I'm having a rel canonical added since this page is used for a lot of vanity deeplinks.
Technical SEO | | PollyKane0 -
Auto Generated Title by Google in SERP
Is there a way to tell Goolge to use my title instead of one generated by Google I have unique meta tags for each page, no duplicates, why Google is doing that? Thanks
Technical SEO | | KentR0 -
Local listings squeeze out my SERP :-(
Buonjourno from 9 degrees C partly cloudy wetherby UK 🙂 Ive noticed website www.davidclick.com optimised for "York wedding photographer" has been squeezed off page 1 by local listings as illustrated here:http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/squeezed-out-by-local-listings_zpsd506cd71.jpg But i do have a local listing and as good as any of the others that have squeezed the site out. So my question is please: "Why has davidclick.com been pushed out of page 1 by a raft of local listings despite this site having a reasonably well optimised local site"? Any insights welcome:)
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
Grazie Tanto, David0 -
Why is Google not displaying the right URL on SERP?
Google is not displaying the URL correctly for this page. (See image) Here is the search that I performed: http://goo.gl/xk7L8 If you click on the URL, it doesn't take you to the page that it the URL references. Any ideas? It should show this URL: http://www.theskincentermd.com/breast-enhancement tsc-serp.png
Technical SEO | | theBREWROOM0 -
Keyword Variants - Low conversion rates - Is a site redesign required?
Hi Guys, I'm Chris & i'm a noob to SEO. Thanks for taking the time to read this and for offering your support! It is greatly appreciated! I work for a small family run company called custom designed cables and we manufacture bespoke cable and bespoke retractable cables. I posted a couple of days ago about how to move forward with our site. Our website has been targeting specific keywords and their variants across the relevant pages to somewhat reasonable effect. Since signing up to SEOMOZ, i have been trying to narrow down the keywords that we target per page and also tried to improve the content on the pages with the help of the on page optimisation tool. I have a few questions that i would like somebody to help me with please if it isn't to much trouble. Firstly, for our keywords, there are a lot of variants. For example, we braid cables. Here are some of the variants of this keyword: cable braid, cable braiding, cable screen, cable screening, cable shielding etc etc. The way i have gone in the past has been to try and target all of those keywords on the relevant page. Now, writing content has been the issue as whilst trying to write good informative information, squeezing in all of the keywords has been a problem and more than likely affected the readability of the page. From what i have learnt since i signed up, this is not a good practice and therefore i have tried to narrow it down somewhat yet i don't really want to lose potential customers finding us by only targeting one or two of the keywords. This is a similar situation for most of our keywords on the majority of our pages. What is the best way to approach this? If i was to write a page per keyword, i don't believe that it would look very good as we could end up with over 100 pages with say 5 or 6 of them talking about the same subject which then leads onto the problem of writing good content. It would be difficult to write good content for pretty much the same thing across such a wide number of pages. If this is the solution though then i would more than happily tackle it. What would be the best way to move forward? The next issue that I have is that since i have been modifying the pages with the help of SEOMOZ, the number of enquries that we have received have fell off the charts. We used to average around 50 enquiries a month from the website and since i have modified the site, i'd say we've had probably 20 since the end of February. The funny thing is though, we have also averaged around 200 hits more per month since the changes. So the hits have increased yet the enquiries have died. I was wondering if anybody was willing to take a look at our site: http://www.customdesignedcable.co.uk to give me some general feedback as to why this may be happening and what your overall opinions of the site may be with regards to the layout, look and general feel etc because i am beginning to wonder whether or not the design is what could be causing us to convert so little of our new found visitors. If anyone could also provide me with actionable feedback with regards to our keyword targeting for our pages that would also really really help! I am currently considering re-designing the site in it's entirety and i am interested in your opinions on whether or not this would be a good way to go. Any help that you can give me would be greatly appreciated guys! Thanks again! Chris (Just another website/seo noob desperately attempting to avoid the sack)
Technical SEO | | Chris_CDC0 -
Google Indexed URLs for Terms Have Changed Causing Huge SERP Drop
We haven't made any significant changes to our website, however the pages that google has indexed for our critical keywords have changed to pages that have caused our SERP to drop dramatically for those pages. In some cases, the changes make no sense at all. For example, one of our terms that used to be indexed to our homepage is now indexed to a dead category page that has nothing on it. One of our biggest terms, where we were 9th, changed and is now indexed to our FAQ. As a result, we now rank 44th. This is having a MAJOR impact on our business so any help on why this sudden change happened and what we can do to combat it is greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | EvergladesDirect0