Can changing G+ authorship on a well-ranking article drop its search ranking?
-
We have an article that ranks #1 in Google SERP for the keyword we want it to rank for.
We decided to revise the article because although it's performing well, we knew it could be better and more informative for the user.
Now that we've revised the content, we're wondering: Should we update the article author (and the G+ authorship markup) to reflect that the revisor authored the content, or keep the original author listed? Can changing G+ authorship on an article impact its search ranking, or is that an issue that's a few Google algorithm updates down the road?
-
Maybe not in ranking per se. But if you are signed in as you search, and your google plus profile happened to somehow interacted or be connected-with the person (especially if he is really a well known and well connected ie a lot of people have circled him/her on G+); for those signed in users the article might have showed up on the first page (lets say) and with no authorship or someone else might not even show up.
With this in mind I would keep the author that has the most influences or people that have circled him, or that has the most activity on his/her Google+ network.
Again Google is saying one thing, but with the move of making the search more social this is not unlikely. This also in Google's eyes may not be a pure "ranking" process but more related to "displaying relevant info" from your friends on the G+ network.
Just some thoughts
-
Google plus and authorship dosen't have any influence on the rankings. You can change / remove / add and it won't have any influence on your current rankings.
There are some tests out there specificly for this with the same result - just in order to test Google's statment that it dosne't incfluence rankings.
It dose make sense to play a role in rankings but as the guys from Google said - there is so much room for spam that they can control (at least not yet) that is better to cut it off completly from the ranking signals.
So in a short sentence : you are safe whatever you do.
Hope it helps.
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
-
SEO: Can you rank Amazon product Pages ?
Hi Guys Just a general question about doing SEO for our product pages... We have a range of products on Amazon and wondered if it is worth build some good links to our product pages to get them ranked higher in Google ?? Is it easier to rank Amazon product pages ?? Thanks Guys G Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Significant drop in web rankings
We have two websites and last week we had a significant drop in search engine rankings. Some of these search rankings we have been top 3 for the past 5 years and now we are not in the top 20. Last weekend we changed our hosting provider and IP addresses for the first time in over 7 years. Now is there a way we could work out if we have been hit by the latest Penguin update or if the change in hosting / IP has caused these drop in rankings? I would appreciate any thought or ideas at all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
Compare the rankings
Hi All, I have an example 2 domains are targeting the same keyword, one of them ranks higher then another. Here is the image from OSE http://www.freeimagehosting.net/udq2f Would you be able to tell ( based on the image )which of the domains is winning , "domain 1" or "domain2" and what exactly the " looser " should do to improve its rankings Rgds Webdeal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
My homepage doesn't rank anymore. It's been replaced by irrelevant subpages which rank around 100-200 instead of top 5.
Hey guys, I think I got some kind of penalty for my homepage. I was in top5 for my keywords. Then a few days ago, my homepage stopped ranking for anything except searching for my domain name in Google. sitename.com/widget-reviews/ previously ranked #3 for "widget reviews"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearetribe
but now....
sitename.com/widget-training-for-pet-cats/ is ranking #84 for widget reviews instead. Similarly across all my other keywords, irrelevant, wrong pages are ranking. Did I get some kind of penalty?0 -
Image Search algo changes
Just seen the image algo changes that have apparently been put into place in the last 3 months My spam tester image site didnt seem to feel anything. Did anyone feel image search change (for better or worse?) And on what dates? Cheers Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | firstconversion0 -
Why did my rankings drop?
Hi all, In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links. Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen: 1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see. Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites. 3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too. A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3. I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse. Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net. Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0 -
Sudden drop in ranks and traffic after migrating community website into main domain
Hi, We recently moved our community website (around 50K web pages) to our main domain. It now resides as a sub-domain on our main website. e.g. Before - we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com After - we have www.communitywebsite.mainwebsite.com This change took place on July 19th. After a week, we saw 16% drop in organic traffic to mainwebsite.com. Our ranks on most of the head keywords including brand keywords have dropped. We had created 301 redirects from pages on www.communitywebsite.com before this change was made. Has anybody seen this kind of impact when domains are merged? Should we expect that within 3-4 weeks Google will be able to re-index and re-rank all the pages? Is there anything else we could do to rectify the situation? Any feedback/suggestions are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0