Authorship and Aggregate Rating in SERPS
-
I've setup authorship and aggregate rating information for our website. It all checks in the Structured Data Testing Tool, but the results in the SERPs have been on then off. At first my authorship image showed on all articles were the markup existed, then suddenly it went away. Then more recently, the aggregate rating information displayed on all pages were the markup existed, then again, it suddenly disappeared.
I'm curious if anyone knows if the disappearance of these things are the result of manual action from Google or simply because the algorithm gathering more information that would cause the items to stop showing for one reason or another? In both cases the markup didn't change previous to the results disappearing. This leads me to believe the change in the SERPs wasn't a result of the markup, but rather something on Google's side.
-
Hi Gianluca,
If you can describe what types of schema you have seen to be affected by authority, as in my experience setting up fresh brand new sites with authorship seemed to have authorship show really fast?
I did see most if not all the review sites with aggregate reviews in their snippets drop a while back (earlier than August for my case)
-
When it comes to Authorship and Schema (or Structured Data) visualization in SERPs as rich snippet, a big part seems to be played by the authority of the domain.
What does this mean?
That even though the Structured Data Testing Tool is saying to you that everything is fine, if your domain is not authoritative, probably Google won't render any rich snippet.
This possibly is a way for trying fighting the "rich snippet spam" and in the second half of August I saw that many sites, which had aggregate reviews in their snippets, lost them.
Be aware that not having rich snippets doesn't mean Google is not reading the structured data information in your site, and use it for better understanding its content.
-
While I haven't tested this, I haven't heard that you can't have schema and authorship on the same page. Google has been pushing people to do both. So, I can't imagine that they would do something like that. As for authorship and publishership, they are two sides of the same coin and both are supposed to be used, though I think publisher is supposed to be used on the homepage. Even still, I seriously doubt that using one would block the other.
-
From what I have gathered here and on other forums is it's more of an automated algorithm that Google is experimenting with right now, which is why the inconsistencies in displaying these items.
With that, I'm wondering if anyone has tested and found what could be an influence triggering the information to disappear - assuming that it is all setup correctly and verified via the Structured Data Tool. I saw a post were someone said you can't have both Authorship and schema data on the same page. Another said that rel="publisher" on the same page as Authorship could also block the Authorship from showing. Yet another said Authorship authority was why. These seem like guesses more than anything, so I'm curious if anyone had some test data that could back up these claims or possibly shed some light on other factors that could be potentially be affecting one or possibly both items?
-
If the Structured Data Tool shows that your pages are set up properly, I wouldn't worry about it. Google plays around with their algorithm and I've seen authorship images show up next to my SERP listings on and off. I attribute this to Google tinkering, and possibly my personalized search having something to do with it.
I've ran searches for my own content while logged into my Google profile and gotten different authorship results than when running a de-personalized search.
-
I agree with Vadim. There's constant fluctuation in the authorship and the schema stuff. Google's still trying to figure all that out. The only manual potentially manual action I've seen Google take related to authorship is if the author's image isn't a faceshot.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
I've seen this personally happen to me, and my guess it is something on Google's side as they are trying to fiddle around with what information best to display from your site to SERPs. I'd love to hear others experience with this as well.
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
-
SERP - Sitelinks but not sitelinks and not clickable
We have a rather large site. On SERP, a page is seeing snippet with top navigation links captured. But they are not active links on SERP although on the live site they are. And there are 6 sitelinks showing up as well. Has anyone experienced this before? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | b.digi0 -
Giving a final nudge to lead the serps
hi
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy
might be a weird one to ask. working on an ecommerce site, using all new inbound marketing best practices the site positioned on many keywords on the second page of results. the site started to generate income. Assuming budget is not an issue here, do you have any suggestions on how to give it the final push. any ideas will be considered.0 -
Http and https issue in Google SERP
Hi, I've noticed that Google indexing some of my pages as regular http, like this: http://www.example.com/accounts/ and some pages are being indexed as https, like this: https://www.example.com/platforms/ When I've performed site audit check in various SEO tools I got something around +450 pages duplicated and showing me pairs of the same URL pages, one time with http and one time with https. In our site there is the possibility for people to register and and open an account, later on to login to our website with their login details. In our company I'm not the one that is responsible for the site's maintenance and I would like to know if this is an issue, and if this is an issue - to know what causing it and how to fix it so I'll be able to forward the solution to the person in charge. Additionally I would like to know in general, what is the real purpose of https vs. http and to know what is the preferred method that our website should use. Currently when URLs are typed manually to the address bar, all the URLs are loading fine - with or without https written at the start of each URL. I'm not allowed to expose our site's name, this is why I wrote example.com instead, I hope you can understand that. Thank you so much for your help and I'm looking forward reading your answers.
Technical SEO | | JonsonSwartz0 -
Mobile URLs in the desktop SERPs
Our real estate website URL is listed on desktop search as well as the mobile URL. I've read several blogposts on this subject but I still don't understand the fix for this. I've read to use rel=canonical tags. But does that stop Google from listing it in the desktop SERP? Is there a way to stop this without blocking the mobile site which is what our programmer wants to do? Or is this something we have to live with until Google fixes this issue?
Technical SEO | | MassMedia0 -
Site blocked by robots.txt and 301 redirected still in SERPs
I have a vanity URL domain that 301 redirects to my main site. That domain does have a robots.txt to disallow the entire site as well. However, for a branded enough search that vanity domain still shows up in SERPs and has the new Google message of: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt I get why the message is there - that's not my , my question is shouldn't a 301 redirect trump this domain showing in SERPs, ever? Client isn't happy about it showing at all. How can I get the vanity domain out of the SERPs? THANKS in advance!
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
"Products 1-20" text in the Serp Results
We have e-commence site (zen-cart) and we use our category pages (which has the list of the products) as landing pages. In the Serp results our link is showing up like this Our Page Title www.link.com Rich snip stuff Products 1 - 40 of 93 - Meta Description text I just wanted to know where its getting the "Products 1 - 40 of 93" from, and can it be removed (if we wanted to)? On the landing page say "Displaying 1 to 40 (of 93 products)", But i looked in to the source and it does not say "Products 1 - 40 of 93" anywhere, so google must be coming up with that text. I have noticed other zen-cart sites have the same text, and other e-commence sites have something similar like " 20+ Products"
Technical SEO | | eunaneunan0 -
Server crashed - What should I do regarding Google SERP´s?
We have several travel websites in Uruguay since 2003. These sites have a very high PR and Trust. The server where all our sites are hosted has crashed and we have been for 2 days now trying to fix all this mess. We hope this problem will be fixed today. Please I really need to know what should I do regarding Google. I mean one of our sites has been ranking in top 1 positions for more than 150 keywords. Will we loose all that? What can we do about it? It´s the first time this has happened to our sites.
Technical SEO | | ceci27100 -
Google is keeping very old title tags in the SERPs for my site. How can I fix this?
Hi Around 6 months ago a site I work with changed its brand. One company became two. Despite changing the title when a new site went live around 6 months ago Google still picks up the old title for certain search results relevant to the old title. When a search result is relevant to the new title it shows that. It's very frustrating as we are trying to re-brand and do not want the old brand name showing for some very important search results. Thanks in advance for your help Paul
Technical SEO | | pauldoffman0