Google+ Authorship for Multi-Author Company Blogs
-
- Can a company's Google+ page be designated as the author of web content (as can be done with individuals) so that the COMPANY comes up as the author in the web results?
- Is it preferable for company bloggers to create individual Google+ profiles and be listed as the author of the posts that they write?
- Or rather is it a smarter move to create a company persona (under the guise of a real person) and have all authorship be attributed to that personal Google+ profile.
- AuthorRank is going to become more and more important to Google's algorithm. As bloggers write for a company, if they are listed as the author of the work, they create trust for their own personal brand. If and when this employee leaves, this equity is presumably taken with them instead of remaining with the company. Is this assumption correct? How are companies dealing with this potential issue?
-
I've run into the same problem. As best as I can tell, it can't be done.
To link your personal Google+ profile to your content, you have to use the "Contributor to" section under the "About" page of your profile. Google+ Pages have no such section.
The only work-around I can think of is the "company persona" option you mention, but like you said, that defeats the point of authorship.
-
Anyone who is an author should want their personal Google+ page to be credited with their writing. Then if they leave Employer A they can carry any prestige that they have earned to Employer B.
Although I am an employer and would like to see the company hold credit for work that they have funded, I think that employers who try to block employees from getting personal credit for their work are operating in low form.
Employers who allow employees to receive this type of credit may gain enormously in the future if that former employee does outstanding work and wins honors.
Also employers who hire authors of stature can benefit from the past work and fans of those individuals.
If you have excellent authors on your staff, treat them well, pay them fairly, allow them to be honored for their work and you have a good chance of retaining them. For many authors the opportunity to earn recognition for their work is nearly as important to them as their rate of pay. So, if you cut that off, how do you think they will feel... and what will they think about you?
-
I think Google wants authors only. Based on the first of the two ways of implementing author information in search:
- Check that you have a email address (for example, [email protected]) on the same domain as your content (wired.com).
- Make sure that each article or post you publish on that domain has a clear byline identifying you as the author (for example, "By Steven Levy" or "Author: Steven Levy").
This suggests that Google wants authors, not brands. Google doesn't appear to scan for a company name in a by-line, but I guess it might be possible.
-
The white hat in me knows that the answer to this question is most likely that the company bloggers should write under their own names, else the very concept of AuthorRank is undermined. Yet, I've had these questions for a while now and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the issue. Hoping this sparks some good discussion.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Copyright Theft and Google Rankings
Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more. Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us. I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape. What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetBit0 -
Blogpost Authorship. Should we give credits or not?
We have been paying for getting the content written from writers. Is it a good move to give authorship to writers for writing the articles in terms of SEO. Some writers now have started to demand for authorship from the articles they have written. Should I give them authorship credits from each & every blog post they have written or it will be just a bad move to do so?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Ranking on google search
Hello Mozzers Moz On page grader shows A grade for the particular URL,but my page was not ranking on top 100 Google search. Any help is appreciated ,Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sobanadevi0 -
Restructure of multi-region and multi-lingual site?
I've read through a lot of material to this point on the subject which has been helpful. In making a major decision like this I'd love another set(s) of eyes on this. A lot of the material I read is pretty dated. Thanks for your help! Background: Company is currently maintaining the following sites, some in multiple languages: company.com, company.us, company.de, company.fr, etc. (12 ccTLDs, some multi-lingual). Each site represents a physical office/distributorship in each location. Each ccTLD site (and pages) include both duplicate, and unique, localized content (intermixed). Each country office will be producing content for their ccTLD, though some content will be duplicated from the .com. In essence, there is a .com corporate site template and the ccTLDs will be customized but include a lot of the content on the .com corporate multi-lingual site. Some of the ccTLDs rank ok, some don't, all SEO strategy to date has been implemented by independent marketing companies in each country. I am working on a centralized SEO strategic approach. Approach: My initial thought was to leverage the .com domain internationally by consolidating all ccTLDs within the .com site using sub-directories. Since some regional sites are also multi-lingual, the consolidated site structure might look like this... company.com/en-us/, company.com/en-de/, company.com/de-de/, company.com/en-fr/, company.com/fr-fr/. This would allow for location-specific content to be presented in multiple languages. When I learned how much customization/localization will need to be done (each country maintaining its own blog,etc), and started evaluating things like the length of the urls for marketing purposes, the necessity to have multiple users accessing certain sections of the site, and some insight that the ccTLDs will likely rank better than the consolidated .com, research of other sites (amazon.com has ccTLDs for each country). I began to reconsider my initial strategy, and re-evaluate a .com corporate site in mult-languages with regional ccTLDs with a blend of duplicate and unique content instead. Beyond business needs, my primary concern is preventing duplicate content. I can already see issues arising between the .com corporate multi-lingual site in French, for instance, and the company.fr regional site that would contain some of the same corporate content, and a lot of its own unique localized content. I am imaging the corporate .com actually having to defer to the ccTLDs via rel=canonical to avoid duplicate content issues which doesn't seem to natural (maybe just in the case where the .com corporate site would use rel=canonical to the .us office site) I've had a lot of success consolidating sites and working to build a single, strong, trusted, authoritative domain vs. having to build that same authority, in this case, a dozen times with all the ccTLDs. I am not sure if the ability to leverage a single .com multi-regional/lingual site outweighs the benefit of a ccTLD for a site that operates in a single country. What do you think? What solution would you recommend, all things considered? Please let me know if I am missing something. I enjoyed the challenge of weighing all the factors and am at a point where I could really use some feedback from colleagues. The developers are building the site(s) in Drupal. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0 -
Authorship image
Do you understand google authorship? They removed the image from google but left the name. Cant understand what is wrong. It still shows up in testing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Google local pointing to Google plus page not homepage
Today my clients homepage dropped off the search results page (was #1 for months, in the top for years). I noticed in the places account everything is suddenly pointing at the Google plus page? The interior pages are still ranking. Any insight would be very helpful! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevenob0 -
Buying a domain banned by google
Hi , I came across a super domain for my business but found out that it was a great domain with 100s of link backs but is now banned by Google search engine meaning Google does not index content from that domain. Since the domains linkbacks are from my domin does it make sense to but that domain and redirect those link backs to another (301) and hope that the new domain gets some juice ... I know it is sounding crazy and may not be the best thing to do ethically but still wanted to check if its possible to get some juice.. Rgds Avinash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avinashmb0 -
How to get my blog listed as United states based in google search?
I am from India.I find that when i search here on google.com or google.co.in some of the blogs operated by Indians are listed as United states next to search results.How is it possible and how can i do it for my blog? Help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivmagnuvi0