Establishing Authorship
-
Considering Google's renewed emphasis on E-A-T, and since Google+ authorship is going away, what is the best practice for establishing authorship of content?
Is it still rel="author" but with a link to one's bio on one's website?
Should this be done on every page of a site? If so, can it be in the footer or would it be more effective immediately below the page content?
-
Dr. Egol - thank you for the thoughtful answer. I'll give it a try!
-
Just saying what appears to work well here...
At the top of each article, immediately under the title, give author attribution such as:
Author: Dr. Jonathan Egol, D.M.D., MAGD.
The author's name and credentials, if any, are displayed, and the name of the author hyperlinked to a biographical page about the author on the same website. The hyperlink is coded as <a rel="author" href="https://etc....
The biographical page contains a few sentences that hit the most important credentials and experience of the author, in a professional tone rather than braggadocio. (this paragraph is meant for search engines, but also visitors who want to know about the author - this is visitor friendly language and information) That is followed by details of the author's education, work experience, publications, awards, etc. -- this is listed much the same as what you place on a resume or curriculum vitae.
The biographical page might contain hyperlinks to other pages on the web that give important credentials about the author. These pages are where third parties have essentially vouched for the author. These might be: A) a profile article about the author in a medical journal; B) a google scholar page for the author; C) an article in a professional publication about the author's receipt of an award; D) a page about the author in wikipedia; E) links to government registration pages to prove official licenses; F) links to organization websites that show the author as a trustee, board member, etc. G) profile pages for the author on other websites that list his publications there.
If the person does not have these third-party vouchings, a paragraph explaining years of experience, relevant education, relevant licenses/certifications, areas of expertise, etc.
All of this is followed by a bibliography of the author's most important or most popular articles, with hyperlinks to where they can be found on the web.
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 to rank a page on established site quickly
Hi, I'm looking for information about how I can rank an e-commerce category page quickly from a link building perspective. It usually takes me 6-12 months to rank these pages within the top 3 spots with link building, but I would like to get results faster. My site is established for more than 10 years and performs well in Google organic search. Here is what usually works over a 6-12 month time span: 15-40 links within articles on DA 15-60 sites, built within 6-12 months More than 75% of the links are from blogs Variety of anchor text Combination of follow/nofollow Deep links to product pages within the category we're trying to rank Might be important to note that it was easy for us to get category pages listed in DMOZ categories, when it was still around but it didn't seem to play any role in getting ranked faster. Note: We only build links on real sites with real traffic and decent performance metrics. No PBNs or other crap sites. I'd sincerely appreciate it if anyone can make any suggestions or point me towards helpful info. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
Establishing if links are 'nofollow'
Wonder if any of you guys can tell me if there is any other way to tell google links are nofollow other than in the html (ie can you tell google to nofollow every link in a subdomain or something). I'm trying to establish if a couple of links on a very high ranking site are passing me pagerank or not without asking them directly and looking silly! Within the source code for the page they are NOT tagged as nofollow at present. Hope that all makes sense 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Will I mess with Authorship if I setup multiple client websites under my Webmaster tools login?
I currently have a dozen client websites or so that I have setup under my Webmaster tools login. Should I put them each separately under their own webmaster tools, then just add me as a user? Is the way I'm doing it now messing with Authorship?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daviddischler0 -
Quantity or quality in Google+ authorship?
Hi folks, here goes a (hopefully) easy one for the local authorship gurus. For our blog content strategy we currently have two inhouse contributors. Both have decent Google+ profiles and one is in the process of really establishing authorship/influence by submitting guest posts to several industry sites, sharing content in Google+, engaging in conversations in twitter, etc. Posts by this latter contributor already rank page 1 for the main keywords. We now have a new content contributor who is a retired employee from the company and a good friend. He has written excellent content that will be published in our blog in the coming few months. He does not have a Google+ profile but he can have one if we ask him to, but he is not going to use it for anything other than writting on our blog. He does not mind having his content published under any of our current Google+ profiles. Question: should we include this new content under our current profiles or should we create a new Google+ profile for this new contributor knowing that it will be an 'empty' profile? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TIBA0 -
Multiple Authors Google + Authorship
Hello, I took a look through past questions but can't seem to find a definitive answer on setting up Google + Authorship credit (for multiple authors) using a Wordpress blog. Has anyone had experience setting this up? Or could you recommend solid reading/research? I took a look at a couple of Wordpress plug in's but just found them very confusing (so did our IT contact who will ultimately be setting up code for this.) Any direction or advice is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
Redirect non www. domain to WWW. domain for established website?
Hey guys, The website in question has been online for more than 5 years but there are still 2 versions of the website. Both versions are indexed by Google and of course, this will result in duplicate content. Is it necessary to redirect the non-www domain to the www. domain. What are the cons and advantages? Will a lot of organic traffic be lost at first (if non-www are getting a good amount of traffic)? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
Will authorship for a reviewer, not an author work?
I'm working with a client that owns a medical site. All content is reviewed by someone from their medical board (doctors or nurses), but the content is written by a variety of authors. I'm wondering if we could create authorship profiles for the doctors and nurses. Would there be any problem with that? (even though they didn't write the content, they just reviewed it for medical accuracy). The name of the reviewer is included on every article. Any thoughts / feedback / similar experiences would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
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