Rel Publisher Tag is showing in SERPS, with Rel Author Picture

[Jinx14678]

Hi,

This is occurring on a few of my pages on a website I manage.

Our homepage, which only has the correct rel publisher code to our brand Google+ page, just started this weekend showing with Rel Author rich snippet.

Also, a test with Google's rich snippet testing tool shows the correct Brand Page and Logo, not authorship. Only is SERPS does it show incorrectly

Has anyone had this happen, and how did you overcome?

[DennisSeymour]

they are testing things right now but what you see with authorship is pretty normal. If you homepage shows both rel author and rel publisher, it will show the author most of the time. They dont show the logo/publisher picture in the serps normally but they have started testing it recently.

[Jinx14678]

As stated above, Rel Author is not anywhere, or rel Author association signals anywhere on the page, I know they "are testing things" right now (aren't they always) But wondering specifically anyone else was seeing this Rel Author/Rel Publisher transposition

[dreeves]

I'm currently in the same situation you are, haven't been able to fix it as of late. I've noticed it with a bunch of competitors as well.

[Dr-Pete]

Truthfully, we're having a terrible time with authorship here on Moz. Google is showing avatars of commenters and all sorts of weird stuff, and this is without even putting rel-publisher into the mix.

Wish I had some answers, but from what I'm seeing with new Google features, this landscape is evolving so quickly that they haven't really figured out how best to promote and display publisher info. Trying to tweak the signals to remove authorship could backfire, so I'd honestly probably let it ride for a couple of months unless it's a major issue for the brand. I don't know of any way to tell Google to remove a rich snippet.

[Jinx14678]

Thanks!

Yeah it was a pretty big brand issue - Although, I cannot say with full ceartainty this below fixed it (since I do not want to put it back to test and have it possibly re-appear)

I changed the "Contributor" section link to our blog instead of root domain in G+ author account.

A few days later, even after removing publisher on homepage our Google + still showed up on the right side (G+ connect) for our brand terms and the correct author showed up for articles in blog.

But the internal pages (not on blog) with Publisher, stopped showing Author picture without removing publisher tag.

Maybe this will help someone else!

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, didn't notice the date of the original post (apparently got assigned clean-up on this one). Thanks for the update. It's really frustrating trying to sort out what works and doesn't work, especially for something that seems like it should be pretty straightforward. If we can't sort it out, what's your everyday webmaster supposed to do?