How Are You Handling Blog Posts/Author Pages when Employees Leave the Company?

[RosemaryB]

What do you believe to be the best approach in handling blog content for employees once they have left the company? We don’t want to remove the blog posts so they need to stay, but then there are the author pages.

This gets tricky because the CMS ties the blog post to the author.

One approach might be to change the author’s name to the Company’s name to get around author pages for people no longer with the company.

It’s kind of tricky because the blog posts won’t have the same credibility if they don’t have a person’s name/photo associated with the post.  We could leave the blogger’s page and list him as a “Contributing Author” once he’s left the company.

Thoughts?

[KeriMorgret]

At Moz, we remove the "staff" sash from an author's profile when they leave, but we don't do anything regarding their posts -- they're all left as-is.

[Lumina]

Akin to what Keri's said, I don't think there's any reason to change the authorship in your CMS.

Yes, the article(s) may have been written by someone no longer with your company, but it's most likely that their posts are considered intellectual property (IP) owned by your company. If you paid someone to write something, it's yours - barring anything to the contrary in their contract.

[EGOL]

I agree.  If the author was a talented writer then you will lose the benefit of their authority if you change the attribution to "nobody".  If the writer continues to produce good work in the future then you will benefit from the growth of their authority over time.

Google says that someday they will start ranking the works of authoritative writers higher in search.

I have been writing as part of my profession for about 40 years.  The first works that I produced still have my name on them.  My past employers have not scrubbed my name from my work.

Today, with authorship in Google, your employees might get very angry they see you scrub authorship when someone leaves.  If they did good work for you they will want to carry that with them.  So, if you want to get the best possible work out of your authors they best not see you scrubbing credit for their work.

Keep in mind that a powerful author leaving your biz and going to your competitor will help your competitor as well.... but at the same time the work that they do for your competitor will also be helping you.  Nothing like having a competitor paying for some authority that flows through to your website.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Yeps we do the same thing, they won't have access anymore in our CMS so we'll include on their author bio that the editor has left the company and what company they went to work for. In some cases in their new job they also want to contribute and that leaves their (old) content still as it was.