How Are You Handling Blog Posts/Author Pages when Employees Leave the Company?
-
What do you believe to be the best approach in handling blog content for employees once they have left the company? We don’t want to remove the blog posts so they need to stay, but then there are the author pages.
This gets tricky because the CMS ties the blog post to the author.
One approach might be to change the author’s name to the Company’s name to get around author pages for people no longer with the company.
It’s kind of tricky because the blog posts won’t have the same credibility if they don’t have a person’s name/photo associated with the post. We could leave the blogger’s page and list him as a “Contributing Author” once he’s left the company.
Thoughts?
-
Yeps we do the same thing, they won't have access anymore in our CMS so we'll include on their author bio that the editor has left the company and what company they went to work for. In some cases in their new job they also want to contribute and that leaves their (old) content still as it was.
-
I agree. If the author was a talented writer then you will lose the benefit of their authority if you change the attribution to "nobody". If the writer continues to produce good work in the future then you will benefit from the growth of their authority over time.
Google says that someday they will start ranking the works of authoritative writers higher in search.
I have been writing as part of my profession for about 40 years. The first works that I produced still have my name on them. My past employers have not scrubbed my name from my work.
Today, with authorship in Google, your employees might get very angry they see you scrub authorship when someone leaves. If they did good work for you they will want to carry that with them. So, if you want to get the best possible work out of your authors they best not see you scrubbing credit for their work.
Keep in mind that a powerful author leaving your biz and going to your competitor will help your competitor as well.... but at the same time the work that they do for your competitor will also be helping you. Nothing like having a competitor paying for some authority that flows through to your website.
-
Akin to what Keri's said, I don't think there's any reason to change the authorship in your CMS.
Yes, the article(s) may have been written by someone no longer with your company, but it's most likely that their posts are considered intellectual property (IP) owned by your company. If you paid someone to write something, it's yours - barring anything to the contrary in their contract.
-
At Moz, we remove the "staff" sash from an author's profile when they leave, but we don't do anything regarding their posts -- they're all left as-is.
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
-
Hi Moz, Asking on how to put the canonical header manually onto old blog posts?
Hi Moz, Can you help me on how to put canonical header manually onto old blog posts? Thanks
Content Development | | Jeanie040 -
Curated content on page one of google for medium competition keywords?
Has anyone here ranked curated content on page one of Google for medium competition keywords?
Content Development | | jtbaker19710 -
Lonely lonely pages
On my site I have tons of blog posts that have never been visited. (Falls on floor in tears). I of course know why. The content is mediocre in most cases and when it was average to good I didn't market it more. My question is should I go and just scrub the non visited pages or spend the time making these pages better and work on making the content above average? My competition above me do not have as many pages and their ranking is purely (I have researched this to death) from links from sites they have developed - with good authority.
Content Development | | GrangeWeb1 -
Any help on best practices to move blog domain?
Hi, I am going to move my blog hosted on wordpress.com to a folder under mysite.com. (e.g. mysite.com/blog/). I start to think after the blog has gone live there will be duplicated content issue because I am going to import my posts in last 2 years onto the new location. I what way can I avoid that happen? Can I set something up (e.g. 301 redirect) in my current wordpress.com account? Any advice. Please help! Thanks
Content Development | | LauraHT0 -
Blog Benefits
I read a very interesting answer by Andy Solo to a previous question in which he replied: "Use your blog to create some Tips & How-To's, optimize those blog entries for the long tail keywords and soon enough your blog will be the gateway into your website. Learn how to target longl-tail keyword searches and how to analyze keyword competition to find the right niche blog posts to create". With my own company site, www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk which has a long-standing blog attached, www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/blog I always felt that the blog content greatly aided our top positions in Google.co.uk. However, over the last 12 months we have slipped right down page one and I wondered if the blog is still helping our site or if the emphasis/value has switched and Google is looking at a lot of other factors where we score badly? Colin
Content Development | | NileCruises0 -
Best Blog Post Format for SEO?
Wondering what the best way is to display blog posts, and organize a blog in general, for maximum SEO benefit. Displaying the entire blog post for the reader to scroll down right on the main page of the blog? With previous posts displayed farther down on the same page. Displaying a snippet/paragraph of the post with a link to continue reading - this way each blog post has it's own dedicated page? And the main blog page can display more topics. Any additional ideas or suggestions to think about would be great. Thank You!
Content Development | | NiallTom0 -
Looking for advice on blog implementation...
I am getting ready to implement a blog for my company. We have our website controlled through a commercial Content Management System that has a blog feature, but it is cumbersome to use and doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a Wordpress blog for example. I know for SEO purposes that we would be better to use the CMS blog and make it a subfolder (www.mysite.com/blog) instead of using a subdomain (blog.mysite.com). However, we would like to use the hosted WordPress blog and find a way to retain the same SEO value for our www.mysite.com site that it would provide being a subfolder on the site. Any suggestions? Installing Word Press CMS on our current web servers is not an option. We would have to use Wordpress hosting services for the blog.
Content Development | | KHCreative0 -
Duplicating Articles/Blogs
Two years ago, some articles and blogs were written and submitted to certain tech and news sites relevant to our field. Will it be fine to submit those to other sites now. It is our content only and not some one else, but would it be penalty to submit the copy to other article sites whereever those articles/content are relevant today also?
Content Development | | sayeed0