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Google Provides FAQ About Authorship, From Blocking To No Mascots

Danny Sullivan on August 21, 2013 at 1:53 pm

Trying to get your head around Google authorship? The Google Webmaster Central blog has posted a new FAQ designed to provide some answers.

What Qualifies For Authorship?

What pages can have authorship applied to them? Criteria include the page actually being mostly authored by the designated author, that it carries a byline and that it’s a single article, not a compilation page of articles by the author.

No Mascots Allowed!

Think it would be funny if the Geico gecko appeared as an author in Google search results? Google doesn’t. Google “prefers to feature a human,” it says.

Pick One Google+ Profile

Think it would be cool to have multiple Google+ profiles in different languages, to link to if you write in different languages? Don’t, says Google.

One Author Only, For Now

Sorry, Google authorship still doesn’t support pieces with more than one author. Google says it’s still experimenting on how to deal with the situation of two or more.

Yes, You Can Block Authorship

Don’t want authorship to appear, which can sometimes happen even if you don’t set it up? Google reminds that you can block your profile from being used for authorship according to the instructions here.

Authorship Isn’t Publishership

Similar to the rel=author tag that Google provides, there’s a rel=publisher tag designed to help publishers identify a publication with content. But this is completely separate from authorship, Google reminds. And it doesn’t really do much, at the moment.

Authorship Isn’t For Product Listings

Sorry, even if one particular employee has worked really hard to customize a product page for retail items or perhaps for property listings, authorship is “discouraged” in these cases.

More Information

For more, see Google’s blog post today, its guide to authorship, our own The Definitive Guide To Google Authorship Markup and some of our other articles, below:

About The Author

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.