Google+ Authorship for Multi-Author Company Blogs
-
- Can a company's Google+ page be designated as the author of web content (as can be done with individuals) so that the COMPANY comes up as the author in the web results?
- Is it preferable for company bloggers to create individual Google+ profiles and be listed as the author of the posts that they write?
- Or rather is it a smarter move to create a company persona (under the guise of a real person) and have all authorship be attributed to that personal Google+ profile.
- AuthorRank is going to become more and more important to Google's algorithm. As bloggers write for a company, if they are listed as the author of the work, they create trust for their own personal brand. If and when this employee leaves, this equity is presumably taken with them instead of remaining with the company. Is this assumption correct? How are companies dealing with this potential issue?
-
I've run into the same problem. As best as I can tell, it can't be done.
To link your personal Google+ profile to your content, you have to use the "Contributor to" section under the "About" page of your profile. Google+ Pages have no such section.
The only work-around I can think of is the "company persona" option you mention, but like you said, that defeats the point of authorship.
-
Anyone who is an author should want their personal Google+ page to be credited with their writing. Then if they leave Employer A they can carry any prestige that they have earned to Employer B.
Although I am an employer and would like to see the company hold credit for work that they have funded, I think that employers who try to block employees from getting personal credit for their work are operating in low form.
Employers who allow employees to receive this type of credit may gain enormously in the future if that former employee does outstanding work and wins honors.
Also employers who hire authors of stature can benefit from the past work and fans of those individuals.
If you have excellent authors on your staff, treat them well, pay them fairly, allow them to be honored for their work and you have a good chance of retaining them. For many authors the opportunity to earn recognition for their work is nearly as important to them as their rate of pay. So, if you cut that off, how do you think they will feel... and what will they think about you?
-
I think Google wants authors only. Based on the first of the two ways of implementing author information in search:
- Check that you have a email address (for example, levy@wired.com) on the same domain as your content (wired.com).
- Make sure that each article or post you publish on that domain has a clear byline identifying you as the author (for example, "By Steven Levy" or "Author: Steven Levy").
This suggests that Google wants authors, not brands. Google doesn't appear to scan for a company name in a by-line, but I guess it might be possible.
-
The white hat in me knows that the answer to this question is most likely that the company bloggers should write under their own names, else the very concept of AuthorRank is undermined. Yet, I've had these questions for a while now and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the issue. Hoping this sparks some good discussion.
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
-
Google Update
My rank has dropped quite a lot this past week and I can see from the Moz tools that there is an unconfirmed Google update responsible. Is there any information from Moz on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
What is Google supposed to return when you submit an image URL into Fetch as Google? Is a few lines of readable text followed by lots of unreadable text normal?
I am seeing something like this (Is this normal?): HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Autoboof
Server: nginx
Content-Type: image/jpeg
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Last-Modified: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:23:04 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=1209600
Expires: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 15:23:55 GMT
X-Request-ID: v-8dd8519e-8a1a-11e5-a595-12313d18b975
X-AH-Environment: prod
Content-Length: 25505
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:24:11 GMT
X-Varnish: 863978362 863966195
Age: 16
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive
X-Cache: HIT
X-Cache-Hits: 1 ����•JFIF••••��;CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v80), quality = 75
��C•••••••••• •
••
••••••••• $.' ",#(7),01444'9=82<.342��C• ••••
•2!!22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222��•••••v••"••••••��••••••••••••••••
•���•••••••••••••}•••••••!1A••Qa•"q•2���•#B��•R��$3br�
••••%&'()*456789:CDEFGHIJSTUVWXYZcdefghijstuvwxyz���������������������������������������������������������������������������•••••••••••••••••••
•���••••••••••••••w••••••!1••AQ•aq•"2�••B���� #3R�•br�0 -
Guest blogging??
Hi all! I heard that Google comes down on guest blogging. I did a search here on Moz with the terms "Guest Blogging" and not much comes up, as it relates to my question. So I'm asking: I have a website with specific content where I can implement a "team blog" (stackideas - easyblog), and have industry professionals submit a blog article (once a month on their respective industry focus), and add Google Authorship (link to/from their Google+ profile contributors section), but not allow ANY follow links back to their site. There will be about 10 different blog categories, and there will potentially be several different authors in each category who will be writing specific focused content per category. Any potential Panda (or any other animal 😉 problems with that? Thanks all! BB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Google Manual Action Disappear
Hi Guys, I have a website that received unnatural link message. We had started link removal process, disavowed not approachable links and file reconsideration four times but all the times Google sent some samples of unnatural links and rejected our reconsideration. Last week we again disavowed non approachable links and planned to file reconsideration after a week but today when i tried to file reconsideration, Manual action message was disappeared. We haven't received any message from Google. The same case was happened with one more of our site earlier. Manual action disappeared means it has been revoked or something else??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
How to NOT appear in Google results in other countries?
I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries? The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Google Plus Authorship
Situation Description: I have a website called Website A. I wish to migrate alot of the content from Website A to Website B. Website B will be on a completely different domain name and environment. Authors of Website A will act as contributing authors for Website B. It is also possible that other contributing authors of other websites C and D commit to writing content on Website B. Questions (1) Does it make sense to create a google plus profile under UserA@websiteA.com and link from content on websiteB to their google plus profile under UserA@websiteA.com? (2) Does AuthorRank affect PageRank? If yes, if I take the above approach would websiteA be effected or websiteB since the content writers of websiteA are contributing to websiteB? (3) Is it ok for userA to have a corporate google plus profile assuming he might also have another google plus profile under a different address? I always think it make sense that there exists a google plus profile at an employee level and another google plus profile at a personal level. (4) If an employee leaves the company, do I leave his/hers Google Plus profile alive? The fact that no more content would be published under that particular profile, would that negatively effect author rank over time? (5) Another interesting observation is that UsaToday, CNN etc do not use authorship? No authors link to their twitter profile or google plus profile. Shouln't they be doing this in terms of author rank or is author rank not that important? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo12120 -
Google indexing issue?
Hey Guys, After a lot of hard work, we finally fixed the problem on our site that didn't seem to show Meta Descriptions in Google, as well as "noindex, follow" on tags. Here's my question: In our source code, I am seeing both Meta descriptions on pages, and posts, as well as noindex, follow on tag pages, however, they are still showing the old results and tags are also still showing in Google search after about 36 hours. Is it just a matter of time now or is something else wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
How is Google choosing which authorship profiles to display?
Does any one know how you can try to make authorship profiles show in SERPs other than just making sure the profiles were installed correctly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0