Authorship on Pages
-
Hi there - I have just been told that it is a big "no no" to add authorship to a standard page and that it should only be used on blog posts. Is this true?
What are the negative effects of using authorship on a page?
I added the rel="author" tag to a page that talks about a member of our team and a few weeks ago his picture started showing next to the search results entry on Google - great for click through rate, however is this improper usage?
Any help welcome!
-
Right now there is not penalization for using the rel="author" markup in pages that are not posts, articles, white-papers... tl;dr all kind of authored content with a visible by line.
But I confirm you that using authorship other than those kind of contents is deprecated by Google, and I won't be surprised that will be penalized or simply not shown.
In those pages, if you really need to use structured data, and it may be useful for Entity Recognition, I suggest you to use the Schema.org Person.
-
My take on it is this; on pages use Publisher, because it is company content. No one really inquires to who wrote your about page on your site, it is trivial, but it is not trivial what company the about page is about. On blog or opinion posts, I use Author.
-
Did you set up the rel=author correctly as Google would pick it up like that unless you specify in the article ( a good way is to link back to the G+ profile at the end of each leaving no doubt). You can also put some code on your page that links to a singular person though its a bit more effort but good if its nor a word press site etc.
Agree that Google does have its own rules! (and they are not always fair!)
Thanks
-
It might not matter what you do.
We had been using rel=author on pages that were articles written by specific people, but not on information pages such as contributor biographies. However Google started showing the contributors' pictures in the results when the bio pages came up in search.
After some head-scratching, I noticed that in the bios that were affected, the phrase "by [Author Name]" was in the body of the text. That is to say, the sentence, "A number of wonderful articles have been written on various subjects by John Doe, a really great guy," would cause John Doe's picture to appear in the serps next to his bio result, even without rel=author being on the page or "by [Author Name]" being an actual byline.
Google plays by its own rules.
-
Jarno has some great points as he mentioned its for if you author the page simple as really.
I can't say there are negative effects associated that I can think of (doesn't mean there are none) I have however heard of people saying that it can help with rankings (Sorry I don't have link to back this up at the moment).
My advice is If its good content (like a blog or a relevant article in the niche) that is good to associate your self with (as a authority) if not you can get by without it. But as you seem to be finding it has a high click through keep with it.
Best of luck.
-
DH,
how important is it to show a picture of his page next to the result? The page is about him therefor the subject of the page is this person in the photo. So i don't see a problem with that but did he actually write the page? Author is the person that writes the page. In that case I for sure wouldn't use it.
I also wouldn't use it if i would write a general page about for instance vacuum cleaners. Why would I want my picture next to a vacuum cleaner even if I created the page? It's not that relevant is it? So in general I wouldn't advice on using the author tag other then for blog posts with useful information.
hope this helps
Regards
Jarno
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
-
Privacy Policy Pages
When creating a privacy policy page- much of what needs to be added is legal information. This means privacy policy pages may be very similar to others' privacy pages in my niche. Are they all pretty much generic? We have a few different companies and I'm thinking we can have one created and then modify them per company? Is this correct? Mary
Content Development | | MaryNix1 -
Best practice for Wordpress /page/2/
I realize that it might be a minor point but it still bugs me. We have a blog with a number of posts. Content of the posts does not expire or age (in the rare case something changes, we do update the information in the posts). The wordpress blog is setup to display our latest posts and displays 15 posts at once. Since we have a lot of content, the older posts get pushed off the front page which is understandable and desirable behavior. However the pages that have older posts have names like "/page/2/", /page/3/, /page/4/ and so on. This does not look very SEO or user friendly to me. What do you think? Did you come up with something better then /page/ and then a number?
Content Development | | SirMax0 -
Creating a Wiki page
Has anyone had any recent success with creating a Wiki page? I created a page that has been in Draft for 8 weeks waiting for a Wiki Editor to review and approve it. Perhaps someone here is has a more established Wiki account than mine and can help please? PS: Yes, I know a Wiki page doesn't hold much SEO value but it has not been created for SEO purposes
Content Development | | Marketing_Today1 -
Can a rel author tag point to a Google+ business page
I’m trying to get my blog posts to show with rich snippets but they are a collaborative effort from our staff and as such are posted under our business name. We do have some guest bloggers who write under their own name and we use the author tags to show this. Is there a similar way to do this with a business?
Content Development | | mark_baird0 -
Google authorship works on posts, but not on root domain.
When I check Google authorship via the tool Google provides, it says I am confirmed for individual posts, but not for my root domain. I’m using WordPress, and individual posts are fine, but not the blog as a whole. I am the only author… and have given it a week, thinking perhaps it needed time... but no luck. Any suggestions? Thank you!!
Content Development | | VictoriaElizabeth0 -
Page Content?
So I have review pages for websites on my site, each website has a review around 400-500 words. Recently I had my writers write 2 additional articles on each site but about something they have there. My thinking was interlinking them allowing them to rank individually etc. However now after looking around etc.. I see that content that is upwards of 1000 words or more might be more powerful and the way this is all written etc.. I could easily put it all on one page.... So my question is do I go with 3 pages or 1 page. I can see strength in both
Content Development | | dueces0 -
How can I resolve a duplicate page issue?
I have (an attached) report that shows duplicate content for a blog page and I'm not sure how to resolve the issue. The blog/website is hosted on wordpress.org, maybe it's something to do with having to add categories or tags - can anyone help please? SDtXT.png
Content Development | | lindsayjhopkins0 -
Changing Text on Pages
For one of my sites I'm in a situation where I have 6 main pages that are for lack of a better word "showcased," one of which being the homepage. The problem is that I am seeing pretty good traffic growth, but my conversions/sales are really weak, and I'm about 95% positive that this is because there is too much information on all of those pages --- each one has about 1500 words or so. The site architecture and link structure on the site is good as out of the couple of hundred pages on the site only 3 of them aren't indexed according to Google webmaster tools. What I want to do is rewrite the text on those six main pages with more of a sales type of feel and limit them to 500-700 words or so. This will have no impact on the link architecture whatsoever, but I'm a bit worried that it will have a negative impact on my continual traffic growth. Actually, I'm not as much concerned about the continual part as the steady new content stream should take care of it, but I would be very concerned if I lost the rankings that I have right now. Granted, those rankings aren't worth as much as they could be because conversions are down, so so it's kind of a catch-22. The question is, how dangerous is what I'm planning on doing? On a side note, my lack of conversions has nothing to do with my description or title tags that show up in the results as they are targeted properly and written for sales. The problem is that the pages, though rich in content, are a bit too rich in content and need to be fixed to work in unison with the descriptions and titles.
Content Development | | RussNauta0