Rel Author Tag - Attributing Content to a Company
-
If the content is written by a corporation and cannot be attributed to a specific writer, yet we want to claim the authorship - can a logo be used instead of a headshot in the Google Profile?
Researching the above, and found that its a NO, but it can be done somewhat through rel=publisher tag, which at present is not very useful. Any other thoughts?
-
The answer is yes, absolutely. There is mass confusion over this and there have been many posts in the Q & A about this. I have struggled with this and researched this extensively.
You first need to set up a proper Google+ page for your company. This is tricky as I', sure you've discovered because you don't want that page connected to one specific person's Google profile.
Here is a link to an interview and partial transcript that tells you exactly how to do this correctly:
Thanks goes to Chris Goward of Wider Funnel Marketing. He interviewed Janet Driscoll Miller at SMX West after her presentation on Google+ and SEO
Here is the excerpt that answered my question about Google+, personal Gmail accounts, Google+ pages for businesses and branding:
"The administration of those pages can be tricky, because it's not exactly like Facebook pages. People expect it to be like Facebook and it's not. You can have multiple administrators but there's still one owner. So, for instance, if you're the business owner, you should go in and do it, so it's under your email address and you always have the ultimate control. So make sure that the person you're giving it to, that either it's an email address that multiple people can get to or that the owner of the company could. The other challenge is that most people use their Gmail account to sign up. Well, the problem is, if I'm the social adminstrator and I leave the company and I used my Gmail address to set up the page, I can never transfer that Gmail, necessarily. So you want to try...you can set up unique profiles, with your own domain name. So I like to recommend that, just because I feel like it's safer for companies."
So here's the best way to set up a Google+ page for business:
1. Have a business owner create the account using a Gmail username related to the business or brand, something like this:
2. Don't use a gmail account as the email address in the sign up process. Use an email account that is a general email address at your company that multiple people could have access to if necessary., something like this
GooglePlusPage@MyBrandName.com
3. Have your social adminstrator or social media manager and team members associate their Google+ profiles with the core Google+ page set up by the owner. That way, if they change positions or leave the company, they can be disassociated with the business page, but maintain their personal profile as they move on to something else.
This information was copied from my own response to this Q & A: http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-you-have-to-have-a-google-profile-page-for-a-person-before-you-can-build-a-google-brand-page
I hope this helps. I have actually written to Google asking them to clarify all of this because everyone is so confused. As of yet, they've not provided any help.
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
-
Hreflang Tags - error: 'en' - no return tags
Hello, We have recently implemented Hreflang tags to improve the findability of our content in each specific language. However, Webmaster tool is giving us this error... Does anyone know what it means and how to solve it? Here I attach a screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/a4AsqLNtF6J Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Duplicate Content Problem!
Hi folks, I have a quite awkward problem. Since a few weeks a get a huge amount of "duplicate content errors" in my MOZ crawl reports. After a while of looking for the error I thought of the domains I've bought additionally. So I went to Google and typed in site:myotherdomains.com The results was as I expected that my original website got indexed with my new domains aswell. That means: For example my original website was index with www.domain.com/aboutus - Then I bought some additional domains which are pointing on my / folder. What happened is that I also get listed with: www.mynewdomains.com/com How can I fix that? I tried a normal domain redirect but it seems as this doesn't help as when I am visiting www.mynewdomains.com the domain doesnt change in my browser to www.myoriginaldomain.com but stays with it ... I was busy the whole day to find a solution but I am kinda desperate now. If somebody could give me advice it would be much appreciated. Mike
Technical SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Page Content
Our site is a home to home moving listing portal. Consumers who wants to move his home fills a form so that moving companies can cote prices. We were generating listing page URL’s by using the title submitted by customer. Unfortunately we have understood by now that many customers have entered exactly same title for their listings which has caused us having hundreds of similar page title. We have corrected all the pages which had similar meta tag and duplicate page title tags. We have also inserted controls to our software to prevent generating duplicate page title tags or meta tags. But also the page content quality not very good because page content added by customer.(example: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/evden-eve--6001) What should I do. Please help me.
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Duplicate Page content / Rel=Cannonical
My SEO Moz crawl is showing duplicate content on my site. What is showing up are two articles I submitted to Submit your article (article submission service). I put their code in to my pages i.e. " <noscript><b>This article will only display in JavaScript enabled browsers.</b></noscript> " So do I need to delete these blog posts since they are showing up as dup content? I am having a difficult time understanding rel=cannonical. Isn't this for dup content on within one site? So I could not use rel="cannonical" in this instance? What is the best way to feature an article or press release written for another site, but that you want your clients to see? Rewritting seem ridiculous for a small business like ours. Can we just present the link? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Pros and Cons of Rel Author on Product Pages
I've heard that having rel=author enabled on your pages can be great for increasing click through rate but you should not use it on every page on your site. What are the pros and cons of using rel=author on product pages? Do you use rel=author on your product pages or just on your blog articles?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe1 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
• symbol in title tag
We have a few title tags with a circular dot symbol, which is created by the code "•" Humans see a dot, but googlebot sees • Does this negatively impact our SEO, or is googlebot aware that **• == *** to human eyes
Technical SEO | | lighttable0 -
Strange duplicate content issue
Hi there, SEOmoz crawler has identified a set of duplicate content that we are struggling to resolve. For example, the crawler picked up that this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/industry-insight/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career is a duplicate of this page www. creative - choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/Advice-for-a-freelance-career. The latter page's content is the original and can be found in the CMS admin area whilst the former page is the duplicate and has no entry in the CMS. So we don't know where to begin if the "duplicate" page doesn't exist in the CMS. The crawler states that this page www. creative-choices.co.uk/industry-insight/inside/creative-writing is the referrer page. Looking at it, only the original page's link is showing on the referrer page, so how did the crawler get to the duplicate page?
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0