Google+ Account for Authorship: Personal vs. Corporate Account

[Troteclaser]

Hi guys,

We are currently setting up Google+ accounts for our website www.troteclaser.com. We'd like to use them to indicate authorship of our content. As we provide content in 10 different countries, we have to set up a Google+ account for every office location.

Here my questions: Do we have to set up two separate accounts - one for the authorship (for the person who wrote the texts) and another one for our office location (to link with Google places)? Or would a single (unpersonal) corporate account do the job, too?

What's your experience with this?

Thomas

[zeepartner]

You definitely want to have a company account that is independent of users, as they might come and go. I don't think setting up personal authorships makes sense unless you publish a lot of authoritative content. IMO this is more relevant if you are news publishers or frequent bloggers. Otherwise I think a corporate account does the job.

[EGOL]

I can understand how it would be attractive for a company to "own" the content that it publishes.

However, it is possible, if you are getting articles from very high profile individuals in your field, to obtain value from having those individuals associated with the content.    The author also gets credit for the content that they write for you.  This could be "win-win" in many ways and be very different in an author's mind from "they own".

[TheeDigital]

It all depends on what your overall goal is.  If you have no problem promoting others in your company, feel free to do it, however if you don't want to promote your individuals you are not going to want to do this.  (We always suggest promoting the faces within the company, but that's our humble opinion and not always acceptable depending on the company/field. )

As others have said if you are having "high profile individuals" write on your website/blog we would definitely suggest applying authorship to these pages, however if Joe schmo is writing the blog posts I would not worry about it.

Keep in mind as well, Google+ authorship doesn't improve rankings, it does however improve click through rate.

[Troteclaser]

Thanks for the advice. Our goal definitely is to boost the click through rate.

We do not have any high profile writers among our staff, but I thought that a nice portrait of a colleague next to the search results would boost CTR more than our company logo.

So the bottom line seems to be that without a high profile author it won't matter if we set up individual accounts or corporate accounts. I'll guess we'll do some tests in different countries and see what'll work best.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Thomas, I see that you have set up a Google+ local page and linked your entire site back to it using the rel=author tag. I am curious as to what results you have had with this, as the rel=author tag is intended to link content to the individual Google+ profiles of authors (and show author head shots, not brand logos.) Would love to hear what you have discovered!

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Thomas, I'm just checking in to make sure she saw my response about linking Rel=Author  to individual people's accounts, and Rel=Publisher to brand pages. Please confirm, thanks! Christy

[Troteclaser]

Hi Christy,

Sorry for my late reply. Having the entire site link back to the G+ account didn't work at all. It seems that we need to add the author tags and information to each single page to make it work.

Thomas

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Thomas, it's great to hear from you. There are actually a few ways to do this. The most important things to remember are to only install the code on pages with relevant content (e.g. blog posts, articles and in-depth reviews, -not- product pages, -not- every single page of your site) and use the two-way or three-way linking method to link one relevant page to the individual Google+ account of its author. (Don't link to the brand page.)

Did you happen to see this recent Moz post on Authorship? It gives great advice for multi-author sites. Here are instructions from Google for installing Rel=Author code on individual pages.

Thanks for the update -- and please let us know if that works! Cheers, Christy

[Troteclaser]

Hi Christy,

Thanks for the tipps. We wanted to make it easy for ourselves, but it didn't quite work out that way

The thing is that our authers do not have personal G+ accounts and I'm afraid just setting one up for them for the purpose of linking to it for authorship won't work either. I read that the accounts need a minimum of activity to be considered valid by Google.

I thought about claiming authorship with my personal G+ account as the author for all pages of the troteclaser.com, but I'm unsure if there will be issues as my account is in German while the troteclaser.com pages are available in all languages. What's your thought about this?

Thomas

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Thomas,

Is there any particular reason that your authors do not want their own Google+ accounts? Perhaps they do not understand the personal benefits of having an account and especially of claiming Authorship. Have you educated them about Authorship, and how it is a win-win for the publisher and writers? I'm with you, though, you shouldn't set accounts up for them unless they are on board and going to take ownership of them.

As far as claiming Authorship with your personal Google+ account, you should definitely do this -- but only on pages that contain articles or posts that you created (with your byline.) In most cases, this means you should not claim Authorship for your home page, product pages, and definitely not contact forms, terms and conditions, etc.

I'm not sure if the fact that your Google+ account is in German is relevant or not. I will definitely look into this, though. Going to ping a colleague right now.

Cheers,
Christy

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Thomas,

You shouldn't have an issue with pointing pages in different languages to your Google+ account (that is in German only.) Here's what Google has to say about this on its official blog for webmasters:

Q: If I use authorship on articles available in different languages, such as example.com/en/article1.html for English and
example.com/fr/article1.html for the French translation, should I link to two separate author/Google+ profiles written in each language?

A: In your scenario, both articles: example.com/en/article1.html and example.com/fr/article1.html should link to the same Google+ profile in the author’s language of choice.

Hope that helps!
Christy

[Troteclaser]

Hi Christy,

That's great news! Thanks for your help with this.

I'll set up the authorship link and bylines for the original authors then.

Thomas

[Christy-Correll]

Happy to help! Let me know how  it works out.