Authorship and Aggregate Rating in SERPS

[Tim.Paulino]

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.

[vmialik]

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.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

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

[brad.s.knutson]

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.

[Tim.Paulino]

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?

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

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.

[gfiorelli1]

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.

[vmialik]

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)