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No, Publishership Isn’t Coming Soon To Google Search To Join Authorship

Barry Schwartz on May 8, 2013 at 9:04 am

There are expectations in some quarters that publishers will soon be able to have their logos showing up in Google in the way that authors can have their pictures appear. But, Google says there are “no plans” for some type of “publishership” to go live similar to the way it handles authorship.

Expectations were raised after Kahena Digital and Standing Dog noted that publishers using rel=publisher can see how their logos would look in Google’s Rich Snippets testing tool.

However, Google told us generally that this has been working that way in the testing tool for months and that there are no plans to announce regarding authorship for publishers. Google is looking at ways to clarify this in the tool for the future.

For example, the rich snippet testing tool shows for Search Engine Land, the company logo in the preview:

But, if you search for [search engine land] in Google, Google does not show the company logo in the search snippet, as it would with authorship.

Here is a screen shot of the result snippet for searchengineland.com in Google:

As you can see, there is no image or graphic of the company logo in the snippet, as you would see for authorship.

Here is how authorship snippets look in Google’s search results for our very own Danny Sullivan.

Again, Google said publishers should not expect to see the company logo show up as they do for authorship pictures in the search results.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.