Has anyone had success with product page rel=author? Can I protect the content but dump the face on the SERPS?
-
Hi,
Is there a way to get the benefits of rel=author for protecting site content but to disconnect that from the face photo on the SERPS?
We added rel=author to our unique and individually written product descriptions and reviews. This has led to a decrease in click thru thus far. I suspect this is because when searching for a product to buy the user sees the face and thinks "review" or at least "not corporate".
I don't nec. want to dump rel=author in the sea yet for our ecom pages, has anyone had success with product page rel=author?
Four our keywords, we are the only company of 10 well known travel sites that have the face in the SERPS, far from improving our CTR, it has trashed it.
Any ideas?
-
I think the company logo or even a picture of the product could improve click through
but this would be going against google rules as they ask for a head shot.
I agree that you may be better of with http://schema.org. But it woulkd be great if you could find a way to protwct your unique contwnt with rel=author and not lose ctr.
-
Hi Xoffie,
This is a really good question, in part because we don't yet know the benefits of adding rel=author to your content, beyond the sometimes rise in CTR.
We assume that Google wants to someday incorporate authorship metrics into it's ranking algorithms and knowledge graph. (if they do this now, I suspect it's minimal or in an experimental stage) Currently, the major benefit of the authorship markup is getting the rich snippets boost from the author profile, and possible increased social visibility in the SERPs.
If you find the photo is hurting you, the first thing I would do is experiment with different photos. Attractive, eye-catching photos seem to get a higher CTR, and you could even experiment with adding a branded logo as your official profile pic as well.
If your site has a good Google+ pretense, you may benefit from the rel=publisher tag. Mostly, I've only seen this tag help much larger publishers like the NYTimes, but it seems to be rolling out to a broader base of publishers now as well. But again, the benefits of rel=publishers mostly seem to be an increased visibility in the SERPs, and don't seem to highly influence rankings (yet)
In the end, I'd recommend on focusing on appropriate rich snippet markup for your products, including price, description, photo, etc. and not worry so much about the authorship markup.
-
I ask because I notice in individual Google profile you must fill in "contributor to" to get the rel=author to work, but that doesn't exist in the company Google profile. Im guessing the "Links" page in the Google + for a company then is how to verify?
-
Hi
OK, so is it the same rel=author steps or is this now a rel=publisher thing?
Thanks
-
Jamie's response is very useful. Make your profile page represent your company and make it easy for the person to then click through to your website from your google+ profile page.
I have had quite a bit of success with the rel=author tag. I have a new site I am creating and I have already had over 30 visits through search (not provided) this week. I am trying to use google+ as much as I can to interact with my site as I think it gives a real boost.
-
One idea would be to create a company page for your site. You can then upload a company logo or other image to represent your company, and use that page to represent the author of your content. Then, any results would show your company image.
For example, look at the SEOmoz Google+ page. It shows Roger bot as their face photo. I don't believe SEOmoz uses their company page as the author for any material, but it seems they could.
To clarify, the above is just an idea and my best guess. I have not implemented this practice.
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
-
How does the background on my product photos impact SEO - step and repeat vs. plain background
I have a new e-commerce site and I'm focused on optimizing it for SEO. If I am taking product photos, will having a step-and-repeat (background with our logo repeated) in the background of the product impact how the images are scanned by Google? In other words, would I benefit from having a plain background behind my item shots vs. a backdrop with our logos all across it? I don't want Google to think I'm spamming my logo across all our items, but also want our photos to be recognized as ours. I want to gain SEO from my effort and definitely not hurt it! Thanks!
Branding | | A_Wo0 -
Unpublishing content question
Hi there, a disgruntled ex-employee requested that my company (a large publisher) unpublish a large number of at this point fairly dated articles. We're going to honor his request. The traffic numbers to these articles aren't significant, but I wanted to understand the SEO ramifications. Two questions: 1. These articles in sum account for 0.51% of site traffic. Will removing them outright cut off just that chunk of traffic? Or will it also affect search rankings for all of our remaining articles? 2. How should we handle unpublished URLs? Is it better to redirect the user to our homepage or a friendly, recirculation-oriented 404?
Branding | | TheaterMania0 -
Help! Odd SERP results on two branded terms.
We have had the ODDEST thing happen to our Branded search. Last week we started seeing our Women’s subdomain (women.duluthtrading.com) outranking our main Duluth Trading domain (duluthtrading.com) on searches for “duluth trading co” and “duluth trading company”. Sample of odd results page: http://screencast.com/t/cKgkaYc1 As you can see- our Women's sub domain is ranking #1 then our main domain, THEN what used to be our organic site links are now listing 3-6. If you search for "duluth trading" though, you will get the typically results page: http://screencast.com/t/qGLDWiM0f We have been trying to figure out how or why this has happened. Our website went out for 30 minutes on January 4th. We thought maybe that is what happened but it has now been 7 days. Any help or suggestions would be great!
Branding | | sderuyter0 -
Company's Official Facebook Page Doesn't Appear In SERP
Hi, Our official company's facebook page doesn't appear at all, in all serp. I'll elaborate all in details here below. We have an official Arabic Company Facebook page with more than 1.9k likes, the page itself is very active and constantly being updated by a person in charge of the Facebook page. We also have an official English Company Facebook page - runs and operated in the same method mentioned above. when I search for my company's BRANDNAME in google.com.sa - both official facebook pages (arabic + english) don't appear in the serp. I've went through all the way to end of the results pages - I couldn't find both pages anywhere. On the other hand, when I search for the brand name + facebook, like this: BRANDNAME Facebook I can find both Arabic and English facebook pages in the 1st page one right after the other. Anyone can help me out here? I'm desperate for solution. Thanks 😉
Branding | | JonsonSwartz0 -
Changing My Home Page Focus Keyword
Hello, We recently launched a new home page design on our company website, but we still have the same focus keyword in the title, H1, and in parts of the page copy. However, this focus keyword no longer represents our entire brand. We want to change the focus keyword and have done some research on the keyword difficulty and local searches in Google, but are still uncertain on the potential effects. Let me explain our situation more in depth. Instabill provides business owners with merchant accounts and other services. Our current focus keyword is offshore merchant accounts. However, over the past three months, we have been helping businesses establish US merchant accounts (retail, mobile, and online--but retail and mobile to US only while online to merchants everywhere) and intend to continue to increase our US merchant base. We are also still able to provide offshore merchant accounts. Our fear is that when a US merchant comes to our website (http://www.instabill.com), they will see Offshore Merchant Accounts in big H1 letters and leave our site since they want a local US merchant account. However, we still want to make sure our international merchants know we can still work with them. Thus said, we would like to change our focus keyword to something more broad, but still descriptive of our brand: merchant services. To elaborate, we want our H1 heading to read Merchant Services for Retail and Online Businesses. Merchant services is more descriptive since we provide more than just merchant accounts. We also provide the payment gateway, free shopping cart modules, help registering businesses, help obtaining an SSL certificate, and a discounted PCI Certification Service through McAfee. We have more than one page on our website that ranks for the term online merchant accounts, but none that rank for merchant services. However, we are willing to put in the work to ensure we optimize our website properly and put in the effort to make the change successful. Merchant services is also a keyword we would like to optimize on our website, so making the change on the home page will only help the steps in the process. Statistics:
Branding | | Instabill
Offshore Merchant Accounts has a 35% difficulty level and we consistently rank for SERPs #1 and #2. This term, according to the Google Keyword Tool, only receives 70 monthly searches in the US, 50 in the UK, 10 in Canada, and 10 in Australia. These are the four countries of most importance to our website. Merchant Services has a 57% difficulty level and we do not rank for it in Google at all since we have never tried to optimize for this term in the past. Also according to the Google Keyword Tool, this term receives 14,800 monthly searches in the US, 1,600 in the UK, 590 in Canada, and 260 in Australia. Clearly, merchant services could potentially get us much more traffic than offshore merchant accounts if transitioned correctly. I suppose my bottom line question is this: Would it be a bad idea to change my primary focus keyword on my home page? What type of results should I expect to see if searching Google for my company name? Thank you for all of your help. Meghan
Senior Copywriter of Instabill0 -
Can anything be done for a single brand page on a corporate site?
I was asked by a friend if there was anyway I could help promote the watch brand that they are responsible for. The brand has only one page on the corporate site. http://gevrilgroup.com/fortis-watches/ My first reaction is that this is impossible to do without creating a stand alone web site and then doing some super cool marketing to get your brand noticed out of the sea of watch manufacturers. My second gut reaction is to stand clear of this request and not get myself tangled in something that will require a lot of resources for someone on a low budget. Any suggestions?
Branding | | irvingw0 -
Rel=author markup in head tag
Between Google's confusing instruction on implementing rel=author and the volumes of blog posts, I'm sufficiently confused. We have a bunch of writers on our site that we'd like to expose in search and connect with their content. I'd like their bylines to link to their author page rather than to their Google+ profile. So, I'm thinking this is what I need to do: 1. Have writers create a Google+ profile linking to their bio page on our site in the "contributor" section of their Google+ profle 2. Add the link rel=author tag to the of their author bio page like this 3. Link their bylines on each story to their author page like this John Public Is this right? I'm working with an inflexible CMS so I have to go through IT, which means I have to get this right the first time. Any feedback/ corrections/ improvements are much appreciated.
Branding | | Aggie0 -
One Page desapeared from Google results over the weekend.
Has anyone had this happen? My page (just one page) is gone from the search results. Not only did we lose our position in Google (we were #9) now the entire page is completely gone from Google index. However, It is on the first page of Bing and Yahoo. We did have our server down from Friday to Monday. I went into Google webmaster tools on Monday and saw a big X next to sitemap. It said HTTP Error 404 detected on August 21, 2011. So Google went in on Sunday and came up with the error. But why only one page is missing and all the other pages still show up? I was thinking that page was blacklisted by Google but when I went to Webmaster Tools to listen to "Requesting reconsideration of your site" video all they talk about is the "site" being blacklisted not a particular page. Any one has any ideas?
Branding | | DmitryP0