Google+ Authorship, Rich Snippits and Three Names - a Problem?
-
Hello All,
I have a conundrum that I thought I'd resolved - but that's popped its gnarly old head over the parapet again.
I have a number of websites that I'd like to have show my ugly Google+ mug as author in the Google SERPS. I jumped through all the authorship verification hoops that Google threw at me and I thought I'd won.
The problem? I have three names: Nick Beresford-Davies.
One example of a page that I'm trying to achieve authorship with is: http://www.graphic-design-employment.com/illustrator-how-to-make-a-pattern.html
I have verified authorship of the above website on my Google Profile:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/107765436751760696335/aboutOriginally I footed the page with Nick Beresford-Davies (hyphenated) and the Structured Data Testing Tool ignored the hyphen and just saw Nick Beresford. So I tweaked my online name (to please Google!) to Nick Beresford Davies (no hyphen). Initially this seemed to work - but I just checked again and now Google, for reasons only known to itself, sees "nick davies" as the author, completely ignoring the name in the footer of the page (by Nick Beresford Davies) and the fact that the site has been verified by Google+. This is also the case for all other websites that I contribute to - and not all the bylines are in the footer - some are by the headline.
When I test pages on the structured testing tool and enter my Google+ profile, it replies:
nick davies, we've found your name as one of the authors from the page. You can use "Authorship verification by email" method above to verify your authorship.Error: Author name found on the page and Google+ profile name do not match. Please consider adding markup to the site.Much as I would like to succeed on the Google SERPS, I draw the line at changing my name to keep this robot happy - so if anyone has any suggestions, or can see any obvious step that I've missed, I'd be very grateful. I find it hard to believe that no other double-barrelled website author exists - so I'm hoping I'm not the only one to have experienced this... Thanks!
-
OK, so as so often happens, after asking a long, drawn-out question, I've gone off and found a working solution. Whereas when I originally tried it the "?rel-author" tag didn't work for me before, now it does. I'm ready and willing to accept that I'd done it wrong the first time around... but just in case anyone will find this ramble of any use whatsoever, here's what I did (as per Google's instructions):
- Add a G+ profile link to each article posted - such as [View Google+ Profile]([your Google+ profile address]?rel=author)
- Make sure that under the "Contributor to" section the root domain of the site is listed. You don't need to put in a link to the specific article - just the root domain.
- Test the link using the structured testing tool again - it should give a pretty much instant result, hopefully in the positive.
- Wish that you'd done this properly in the first place.
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
-
Favicon not showing in google serps
Hi, I have a website where the favicon is not showing in the google mobile serps. It's appearing the default icon instead (world icon). This is the tag I have place in the head section of the website: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" /> The size of the favicon is 48x48 and it's appearing correctly in the browser tag. I've checked that the google robot can crawl it and in the server logs I can see requests from the "Google Favicon" user-agent. Has anyone had this same problem? Any advice?
Technical SEO | | dMaLasp0 -
SEO & IFrame problem
Hi All, I will try and keep this as simple as possible. My product page links to a separate page with an IFrame, giving my users the option to upload artwork for the product. The IFrame contains the external file upload site (mail big file). When finished, the user can use a button link to return to the product page to continue with their order. As soon as the page with the IFrame was crawled by Google, the IFrame page started to rank in place of where my product page used to rank, yet there is no content on the page relating to my product (just a file upload). So now users are visiting the IFrame via the same query which must be an absolute headache and not useful at all. I have tried the following: 1. Added a line in body text which contains an internal link pointing to the product page using exact match anchor text for the query. (This didn't work) 2. I applied a no index tag to the IFrame, and now my product page is no longer ranking at all. Can anyone help me solve this puzzle. I believe I might be missing something. Kind regards, Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
With rich snippets is it bad to add a city to the company name?
I have a client that is a franchise. Each franchise location has a different office address. Is it bad for me to do the following? COMPANY NAME of CITY ... .... There are about 10 franchisees. Should I use just the company name? Is the city in there going to be a negative?
Technical SEO | | thomas.wittine0 -
Google Not liking Magento Sites?
Hello, I'm new to the community and I wonder if anyone can help us shed a light on this SEO issue we are having. We have 3 magento websites that is being affected. Whats happening is that those site were ranked for a specific keyword for few months, but all of a sudden, it just drop like crazy. It went from top 10 to about 150 in a bout a weeks period. Some site, it's not even ranked or stopped ranking and visible on the search engine. Is google not liking MAgento for some reason?? Any help or suggestions will be appreciated! thanks
Technical SEO | | solution.advisor0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of a site migration, and are at the final stage of testing redirects etc. However, to our horror we've just discovered Google has started indexing the new site. Any ideas on how this could have happened? I have most recently asked for robots.txt to exclude anything with a certain parameter in URL. Is there a chance this, wrongly implemented, could have caused this?
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Exchange Links - Problem or Not ?
There's a company that sells a real estate portal sites ready for several companies.
Technical SEO | | imoveiscamposdojordao
And when they install this system they always leave each site in a file calledimobiliarias.php that lists all properties that use your system, so there is a hugeexchange of links between the same sites.
So you can see with the Open Site Explorer that all sites have the same Backlinks.
This would not cause problems with regard to exchange links?
Loss of position or something? Thank you guys.! Sorry. 😛 Google Translator.0 -
Why Google not picking My META Description? Google itself populate the description.. How to control this Search Snippets??
Why Google not picking My META Description? Google itself populate the description.. How to control this Search Snippets??
Technical SEO | | greyniumseo0 -
Name Servers & SEO
We have decided to create a few blogs and will eventually be linking to some of our clients. I have domain privacy and different class C addresses for each of my domains. But the name servers area all the same. Ex: If we create an article for one client on all 5 blogs, will the name servers be a problem?
Technical SEO | | waqid0