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
-
SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages
Hi Moz friends, I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd). This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30. As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance. This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct. The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic. I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here. Thank you in advance!
Technical SEO | | smmour2 -
Authorship Not Displaying
I've been reading through a ton of articles on Google Authorship on Moz as well as a variety of other sites but still haven't solved my issue. I set up authorship a while ago and it stopped working after a very short time. It came back and again stopped working. I use Yoast for the tags. I realize that Google drastically decreased showing authorship photos in SERP but I've never been about to get it to show no matter what I've tried aside from that brief moment of success when I originally implemented the tags. Rich snippet tools shows all as being a ok! Any suggestions what I might be doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | moam0 -
Keyword Variants - Low conversion rates - Is a site redesign required?
Hi Guys, I'm Chris & i'm a noob to SEO. Thanks for taking the time to read this and for offering your support! It is greatly appreciated! I work for a small family run company called custom designed cables and we manufacture bespoke cable and bespoke retractable cables. I posted a couple of days ago about how to move forward with our site. Our website has been targeting specific keywords and their variants across the relevant pages to somewhat reasonable effect. Since signing up to SEOMOZ, i have been trying to narrow down the keywords that we target per page and also tried to improve the content on the pages with the help of the on page optimisation tool. I have a few questions that i would like somebody to help me with please if it isn't to much trouble. Firstly, for our keywords, there are a lot of variants. For example, we braid cables. Here are some of the variants of this keyword: cable braid, cable braiding, cable screen, cable screening, cable shielding etc etc. The way i have gone in the past has been to try and target all of those keywords on the relevant page. Now, writing content has been the issue as whilst trying to write good informative information, squeezing in all of the keywords has been a problem and more than likely affected the readability of the page. From what i have learnt since i signed up, this is not a good practice and therefore i have tried to narrow it down somewhat yet i don't really want to lose potential customers finding us by only targeting one or two of the keywords. This is a similar situation for most of our keywords on the majority of our pages. What is the best way to approach this? If i was to write a page per keyword, i don't believe that it would look very good as we could end up with over 100 pages with say 5 or 6 of them talking about the same subject which then leads onto the problem of writing good content. It would be difficult to write good content for pretty much the same thing across such a wide number of pages. If this is the solution though then i would more than happily tackle it. What would be the best way to move forward? The next issue that I have is that since i have been modifying the pages with the help of SEOMOZ, the number of enquries that we have received have fell off the charts. We used to average around 50 enquiries a month from the website and since i have modified the site, i'd say we've had probably 20 since the end of February. The funny thing is though, we have also averaged around 200 hits more per month since the changes. So the hits have increased yet the enquiries have died. I was wondering if anybody was willing to take a look at our site: http://www.customdesignedcable.co.uk to give me some general feedback as to why this may be happening and what your overall opinions of the site may be with regards to the layout, look and general feel etc because i am beginning to wonder whether or not the design is what could be causing us to convert so little of our new found visitors. If anyone could also provide me with actionable feedback with regards to our keyword targeting for our pages that would also really really help! I am currently considering re-designing the site in it's entirety and i am interested in your opinions on whether or not this would be a good way to go. Any help that you can give me would be greatly appreciated guys! Thanks again! Chris (Just another website/seo noob desperately attempting to avoid the sack)
Technical SEO | | Chris_CDC0 -
Sudden SERP stop for main keyword.
Hey guys, I have a website with about 30 Google indexed pages. Most of my pages are perfoming well for my keywords. My homepage recently started doing extremely well. Number 4 overall for a highly competitive keyword/niche. Then after a week it dropped completely off the map. It still shows for secondary and tertiary keywords. But my primary keyword does not rank anywhere. I checked as deep as 50 pages. It's been 3 weeks now. Any ideas of what might have happened? Is there really a sandbox? Could I maybe have been Panda slapped? Or do you think it is more likely just a technical/SEO issue. It just seems odd that it jumped so high and then disappeared??
Technical SEO | | VictorVC0 -
Pages not being found in serp
Hi I'm helping a collegue with his website. For what ever reason the pages in the Solutions Menu are not being found in the search result for keywords related to the pages. (Homepage mainly comes up in the search result). Does anyone have any advise to why this may be happening? *To give you a bit of a background understanding, previously all the menu content was copied (which I made him change), he also had hidden text on some pages (i made him remove, white text on white background) plus the url structure changed as well. Persoanlly I think he is over using , links, internal linking is not great & the general content is not great in the menu. Your Thoughts are welcomed, thank you.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Max number of results from domain on a SERP
I have read in many places that the maximum number of results that will be displayed on the SERP from a domain or subdomain is 2. Is this still the case? I have seen many instances where there are well more than 2 results from a domain displaying on the SERP. For example, search 'cvs pharmacy' on Google. There are 7 results from the cvs.com domain. Is it the case that the search engines will display more if it's a branded search?
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0 -
Typo Title KW on SERP
dear team, just a question that always annoying me is Google takes typo title keyword on SERP which is not good for client's branding . i have no problem on the actual page meta title setting(correct KW) as well as internal link text, but only thing i can found this anchor text that other people use for the link is typo, so Google still takes that into account just like serveral years ago on Geroge Bush Miserable Failure? how can i get Google correct this ? only to submit request to them ? thank you, boson
Technical SEO | | 1723960020 -
Google Dmoz description in SERPS
My dmoz description is not as KW rich as my sites normal description. IS there an advantage or disadvantage to either? If so, How do I prevent google from doing this?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610