Authorship on Pages

[DHS_SH]

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!

[JarnoNijzing]

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

[GPainter]

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.

[Linda-Vassily]

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.

[GPainter]

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

[LesleyPaone]

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.

[gfiorelli1]

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.