If Google Authorship is used for every page of your website, will it be penalized?
-
Hey all,
I've noticed a lot of companies will implement Google Authorship on all pages of their website, ie landing pages, home pages, sub pages. I'm wondering if this will be penalized as it isn't a typical authored piece of content, like blogs, articles, press releases etc.
I'm curious as I'm going to setup Google Authorship and I don't want it to be setup incorrectly for the future. Is it okay to tie each page (home page, sub pages) and not just actual authored content (blogs, articles, press releases) or will it get penalized if that occurs?
Thanks and much appreciated!
-
I actually don't think it is alright to use Authorship or Publisher on every page and this is not what Google intends, check out their blog on this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/relauthor-frequently-asked-advanced.html
Specifically they say "Authorship annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real person’s perspective or analysis on a topic. Since property listings and product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using authorship in these cases. However, an article about products that provides helpful commentary, such as, “Camera X vs. Camera Y: Faceoff in the Arizona Desert” could have authorship."
So while at this time using Authorship on non-article, product pages is 'unlikely' to get you Google slapped, you are going against their direct advice - which often then gets put into the algorithm when they notice something being abused.
You are right many sites are using this on every page, and it will as of now give you an advantage, even in not in higher rankings then in a more visible results listing which may have a improved CTR. However, as I said once Google see this is being abused they will attempt to stop the practice and make sure it is used for rich content pages only.
Publisher is different in that they want it to be from ideally the homepage to the Business G+ page, they are both different things and Google treats them as separate.
Hope this helps - basically, if what you are doing on your site doesn't benefit your site user, then you are right to question it.
-
Yes, you are right on both counts. I think there will come a time when Google will display the brand icon in place of an image for pages that are marked up with rel=publisher. I can see that pulling through for the sites I manage when I plug them into the Rich Snippet testing tool. Google, however, is not yet displaying those images.
Good luck! It sounds like you've got a good idea of what pages should use what type of authorship.
Dana
-
Hey Dana,
Thanks for the response. So basically what saying is that if it isn't in the immediate authored content area (such as href="https://plus.google.com/104609087715575652977" rel="publisher"/> in the section) then it should be rel=publisher. However, rel=author should be on authored content like the blogs and articles and press releases. This would be shown as "Authored by [Individual Name]" linking the name to the personal Google+ profile, Right?
Also, in doing rel=author /rel=publisher, only "rel=author" translates into the Google+ head shot profile picture in search results, but rel="publisher" will list the company Google+ profile information?
Thanks again for all the responses!
-
There are times when rel=publisher is more approrpiate than rel=author, a product page on an e-commerce site for example. Will a site be penalized for establishing authorship on every page? Absolutely not. In fact, I think that is what Google is intending for people to do.
The problem right now is there is such mass confusion over rel=author and rel=publisher andhow to use them properly, that right now, you see lots of sites that should be using rel=publisher using rel=author instead. Because Google has done such a poor job of articulating how and where to implement these things, I can't imagine them penalizing sites for using one when they should be using the other. Although, I suppose strange things have happened.
I do think that the intention with authorship and also structured data markup is that Webmaster implement all the appropriate tags and markup on every page of their site.
Hope that's helpful!
Dana
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
-
Export domain reference full on google search console
Hi all My website is https://simthanglong.vn/ and it have +7000 Referring domains from competitor use tools bad backlink. i want to disavow it but Google Search Console accept export up to 1000 domains. So, What I have to do. Help me Please.67oetuz.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | simthanglongdotvn0 -
Moving Pages Up a Folder to come off root domain
Good Morning I've been doing some competitor research to see why they're ranking higher than us and noticed that one who seems to be doing well has changed their url structure so that rather than being www.domain.com/product-category/product-subcategory/product-info-page/ they've removed levels so for instance they now have: www.domain.com/product-subcategory/ and www.domain.com/product-info-page/ basically everything seems to come off the root domain rather than having the traditional structure. Our rankings for the product-subcategory pages, which are probably what most people would search for, are just sitting below the first page in most instances and have been for a while I'm interested to know other people's thoughts and if this is an approach they've taken and had good results?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ham19790 -
Duplicate content site not penalized
Was reviewing a site, www.adspecialtyproductscatalog.com, and noted that even though there are over 50,000 total issues found by automated crawls, including 3000 pages with duplicate titles and 6,000 with duplicate content this site still ranks high for primary keywords. The same essay's worth of content is pasted at the bottom of every single page. What gives, Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Googlebot crawling AJAX website not always uses _escaped_fragment_
Hi, I started to investigate googlebot crawl log of our website, and it appears that there is no 1:1 correlation between a crawled URL with escaped_fragment and without it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | yohayg
My expectation is that each time that google crawls a URL, a minute or so after, it suppose to crawl the same URL using an escaped_fragment For example:
Googlebot crawl log for https://my_web_site/some_slug Results:
Googlebot crawled this URL 17 times in July: http://i.imgur.com/sA141O0.jpg Googlebot crawled this URL additional 3 crawls using the escaped_fragment: http://i.imgur.com/sOQjyPU.jpg Do you have any idea if this behavior is normal? Thanks, Yohay sOQjyPU.jpg sA141O0.jpg0 -
Can I use content from an existing site that is not up anymore?
I want to take down a current website and create a new site or two (with new url, ip, server). Can I use the content from the deleted site on the new sites since I own it? How will Google see that?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Copied Content/ Copied Website/
Hello guys, I was checking my product descriptions and I found out that there is a website that is using my descriptions word by word, also they use company name, product images, they have a link that sends you to my site, contact form.. I tried to purchase something and the order came through our email, but i made an inquire and it didn't come through. Also they have a sub-folder with my company name. Also they have url's with my company name, and this isn't right is it? I am confused and honestly I don't know what to do, we don't take part to any affiliation program or anything like that and we don't ship out of Europe. This is a Chinese website. Just for curiosity, I noticed that one of our competitors is there as well, and it does seem weird. Here is the links: www.everychina . com/company/repsole_limited-hz1405d06.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
It appears that no matter what I do, my website is not picking up traffic. What can I do?
I have tried everything, followed everything by the book...yet nothing is happening. I I yet have to try PPC, but I am sure that by now the website is healthy since I have spent from January to the current date fixing every sort of warning and errors. While I have worked on link building strategies(only submitting links to directories for the moment) However the website is dead. What should I do? Is this due to a Google penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ts24group0 -
I think my site is affected by a Google glitch...or something
Although google told me No manual spam actions found i had not received an unnatural link request notice i figured it would be a good idea to clean these up so i did. So i have submitted 3 reconsideration requests from google. They all came back with the same response: No manual spam actions found. I really doubt that anyone at google really checked those out.You will notice that i don't even appear on page 1-10 at all...its clearly google filtering the site out from the results(except for my brand terms), but i have no idea what for.What do you guys think it is? If you see anythign let me know so i can have it fixed.This has been going on for 2 months now...my company has been around for a long time...i dont understand why suddenly im not showing up in searches for the keyword si used to rank for...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CMTM0