Authorship on Pages
-
Hi there - I have just been told that it is a big "no no" to add authorship to a standard page and that it should only be used on blog posts. Is this true?
What are the negative effects of using authorship on a page?
I added the rel="author" tag to a page that talks about a member of our team and a few weeks ago his picture started showing next to the search results entry on Google - great for click through rate, however is this improper usage?
Any help welcome!
-
Right now there is not penalization for using the rel="author" markup in pages that are not posts, articles, white-papers... tl;dr all kind of authored content with a visible by line.
But I confirm you that using authorship other than those kind of contents is deprecated by Google, and I won't be surprised that will be penalized or simply not shown.
In those pages, if you really need to use structured data, and it may be useful for Entity Recognition, I suggest you to use the Schema.org Person.
-
My take on it is this; on pages use Publisher, because it is company content. No one really inquires to who wrote your about page on your site, it is trivial, but it is not trivial what company the about page is about. On blog or opinion posts, I use Author.
-
Did you set up the rel=author correctly as Google would pick it up like that unless you specify in the article ( a good way is to link back to the G+ profile at the end of each leaving no doubt). You can also put some code on your page that links to a singular person though its a bit more effort but good if its nor a word press site etc.
Agree that Google does have its own rules! (and they are not always fair!)
Thanks
-
It might not matter what you do.
We had been using rel=author on pages that were articles written by specific people, but not on information pages such as contributor biographies. However Google started showing the contributors' pictures in the results when the bio pages came up in search.
After some head-scratching, I noticed that in the bios that were affected, the phrase "by [Author Name]" was in the body of the text. That is to say, the sentence, "A number of wonderful articles have been written on various subjects by John Doe, a really great guy," would cause John Doe's picture to appear in the serps next to his bio result, even without rel=author being on the page or "by [Author Name]" being an actual byline.
Google plays by its own rules.
-
Jarno has some great points as he mentioned its for if you author the page simple as really.
I can't say there are negative effects associated that I can think of (doesn't mean there are none) I have however heard of people saying that it can help with rankings (Sorry I don't have link to back this up at the moment).
My advice is If its good content (like a blog or a relevant article in the niche) that is good to associate your self with (as a authority) if not you can get by without it. But as you seem to be finding it has a high click through keep with it.
Best of luck.
-
DH,
how important is it to show a picture of his page next to the result? The page is about him therefor the subject of the page is this person in the photo. So i don't see a problem with that but did he actually write the page? Author is the person that writes the page. In that case I for sure wouldn't use it.
I also wouldn't use it if i would write a general page about for instance vacuum cleaners. Why would I want my picture next to a vacuum cleaner even if I created the page? It's not that relevant is it? So in general I wouldn't advice on using the author tag other then for blog posts with useful information.
hope this helps
Regards
Jarno
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
-
Sitemap - 200 out of 2100 pages indexed
I submitted the .xml sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools and only 200 out of 2100 pages were indexed.
Content Development | | Madlena
Why is that and what can I do ?0 -
Would adding a news page hurt my site ranking ?
Hi Mozers I was thinking about adding an industry news page where we would post articles written by others but give proper citation and linking. Would a page like this hurt my SEO ? Thank You
Content Development | | Pzabarko0 -
How do I redirect a page that no longer exists?
I changed the name of a blog article I wrote and the original name is giving a 404 error. I am not sure why it isn't being directed like the other articles I renamed to improve SEO. Since the webpage no longer exists, I don't know how to redirect it. I use Wordpress and Thesis. Thanks!
Content Development | | dealblogger0 -
How do we setup Rel=Author for Business Pages
Hello, I am interested in adding a rel=author tag to all of our website pages. They are static php pages. How would you suggest we go about doing this? We do have a Google+ business page setup. Thanks
Content Development | | AspectExhibitions0 -
Is putting introduction to new stories on the front page a good idea
Hi, i am trying to find out if i should be putting all the introduction to new stories on the front page of my magazine www.in2town.co.uk. I am not sure if to just put certain stories on the home page or if it would be better for seo reasons to put everything on the front page for the search engines to pick it up quickly. so for example, all health stories, all news stories and all lifestyle stories that have their own section, should i make sure that they all appear on the home page as an introduction. Or should i have them kept in their own section please do let me know
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Adding a picture page - Good or Bad?
I have a lot of cool pics that just did not quite make it on one of my pages. Not necessarily because I did not want to, but space reasons they just happened to lose out to another photo. What I was thinking was, maybe I can add like a gallery page? Possibly with links back to the pages that each photo was considered for? Would this be a decent idea or just a page deemed as having low quality/value and end up hurting my site. Or maybe you can add an idea that may make it work for me!
Content Development | | VictorVC0 -
Duplicate Page Content WordPress blog with categories?
Just got a crawl report back from SEOmoz and it gives me lots of errors for "duplicate page content". Upon investigating, I notice this is because my WP blog is setup into categories so the home page is almost identical to one of the category pages. None of my actually posts are the same but the category pages have some overlap since the same post could show up in two or more categories. Is this a problem or can I just ignore this error? Any thing I should be doing differently? Thanks!
Content Development | | frankthetank20 -
What is the best way to remove old pages (if at all)?
Hi, I have a client who has thousands of pages on his site - 50,000+. It is a news website so most of these pages are old news articles and blog posts that receive very little traffic. We are moving to a new content management system and are debating on whether or not to keep all that old content. So far our decision is to keep the content that has gotten at least 100+ visits from Bing or Google in the last 6 months but dump everything else. This amounts to around 30,000 or so pages most of which have several links pointing to them. My question is from an SEO standpoint is that okay to do? We'd not only lose pages but links as well. Part of me thinks that in light of the Panda update getting rid of old content that is good but not great could about help out the site (we do great in the SERPs and actually got a bump in traffic after the Panda update to new articles/posts). However, we obviously don't want to cause problems and that is why I'd appreciate the thoughts and ideas on the best way to handle this major downsizing in content. Thanks!
Content Development | | Matthew_Edgar0