Google+ Account for Authorship: Personal vs. Corporate Account
-
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
-
Happy to help! Let me know how it works out.
-
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
-
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 -
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 -
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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".
-
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.
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
-
How is it possible that our page outperforms our competitors by all factors yet we are #5 on google search and they are #1, #2 and #3?
I've just carried out "Compare Link Metrics" analysis where I have compared our company page for a specific keyword with our competitors and it appears that our page outperforms our competitors by all factors provided by MOZ.com, yet our page is displayed as #5 in google search results and our competitor is taking #1, #2 and #3 for the specific keyword: "gāzes baloni". Attached are screenshots. Any ideas why this might be the case and what tactics should I adopt in order to change the situation? Here is the link to our website page for this keyword: http://www.intergaz.lv/lv/gazes-baloni And here are the links to our competitor website: http://www.lpg.lv/lv/gazes-baloni/ipasie-piedavajumi/ipasie-piedavajumi.html , http://www.lpg.lv/lv/gazes-baloni/gazes-balonu-specifikacija/ , http://www.lpg.lv/lv/gazes-baloni/gazes-balonu-iegades-vietas/ . Thank you very much in advance. ZoYSJ Zaq1C
Link Building | | Intergaz0 -
Reporting a Link Scheme to Google
Hi Mozzers, Two questions...
Link Building | | FDAitsupport
There is a negative article showing up in the SERPS for my boss name which we've been doing some rep management to get rid of. Well, someone started building links to that property recently, and it has pushed the result to the #2 spot. I did some research, and the property has never had a single link pointed to it until recently. There are 7 referring domains, all of which use the same theme, and have the same author for each article. Each property has over 1,000 articles in not even 2 years. All articles are based around the same topic. The property they are promoting negatively went from 0 backlinks to 55 in under 2 months. My Question is, is it okay to report this to Google? It seems like a cut and dry example of a link scheme. Second question, I have recently seen an increase of spammy links showing up in ahrefs. These links were likely built by a predecessor of mine as far back as 2010. I had been letting them fall off naturally, but now they are coming back (around the same time the above mentioned link scheme began). Do you think someone is re-indexing my links as a sort of attack? Or is it possible Google is re-indexing them? I'm going to contact the webmasters where I can, but seriously considering using disavow tool. My rankings started dropping when the links started getting indexed. And continue to drop. Negative SEO, or Googles recent "Quality Update"? Thanks for any and all input. Ryan0 -
Does Google drop links from page rank N/A sources?
Hi Everyone,
Link Building | | AMA-DataSet
I've started doing some link analysis on one of my site that has over nearly 800 links in total (which I got from the webmaster tools downloading the latest links). When I go on to Google and use the "link:www.mysite.com" directive it will only display 12 links. Does this mean Google is only counting 12 links from the link profile? Iv checked the freshness of some the links it wasn't displaying within Google to check they hadn't all expired. Links from march 2013 still don't appear. This sites link profile has been untouched for at least a year now and is full of directories many of which have a page rank of N/A hence my question. (I'm surprised it hasn't been hit by penguin!) Thanks in advance.0 -
Google disavow DMOZ/ODP spam sites?
Hello Looking into links to my one of my sites (over 10 years old) I've found that along with some bad spammy links, around 80% of my inbound links are from directories that are exact copies of ODP. Should I be concerned about / asking for removal / disavowing these links? Normally I would be trying to get rid of low quality links like this, but since they are ODP clones I'm not sure it's worth the effort. The sites openly state that their data is from ODP (Open Directory Project), but does this mean Google ignores them? I could spend my whole life swatting these links. Thoughts? Edit: I'm hoping for suggestions that specifically reference the ODP clone site situation. I did not create these links, I guess I should have made that more clear.
Link Building | | droo0 -
Website not appearing anywhere on google
Hello, we launched www.comparetravel.ie in June but it is not showing up on google search, we have submitted it to google twice but still no sign of our site. I thought it would at least show up for the "Compare Travel" search term, it only shows up when you type the full website address into google. Any ideas on what we are doing wrong? Alll advice greatly appreciated. (The website is Irish based) Thanks P
Link Building | | CompareTravel0 -
Has Anyone Heard from Google?
After submit RR last week, we got the following from Google: "We've received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.butterflycraze.com/ We'll review the site. If we find that it's no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we'll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can't reply individually to each request." We got discouraged that Goodle said that it'd reconsider if we are no longer in violation. However, we have about 4500 unatural links created by SEO co, who has proceed with some, but, we aren't seen reduction of such links. In fact, it went up. I need advise as how to remove the following (they are the few site with bulk links): fantake.com: have their webmaster info, however, since last request, we still have 1200 links from it. blogspot.com - is there any way to remove links from such site? onlineunionmall.com: don't see any contact info on their site Some suggest us move on by building good links, but, to dilute the power of 4500 unnatural links, it would take forever.
Link Building | | ypl0 -
My Yahoo Directory listing isn't being indexed by Google - what do to?
I couldn't find this elsewhere in Q&A...so here goes. I recently (a couple of months back) shelled out $300 for a Yahoo Directory listing. My site got included, but my PageRank didn't budge. Figuring it may take a while, I kept on checking Google's index for the link - still nothing. Now it seems as if some Yahoo & other directory categories are excluded from the Google Index, rendering the links useless from a PR point of view. Anything I can do about this? I've heard of suggestions like linking to the specific page of the category where I'm listed, in the hope Google will crawl and re-index, but I don't know. Any thoughts / suggestions? BTW the directory category link is: http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Communications_and_Networking/Telecommunications/Wireless/Software. Thanks in advance...
Link Building | | dusanb0 -
Impact of Internal VS Inbound Links
Internal linking channels juice being accumulated through inbound links and the two work as a team. I am interested to hear from those who have either tested or have a fairly good gut feeling about the impact of internal links on rankings (as an additional signal). Also in your opinion how does internal linking compare to external links pointing to the same page (e.g. impact of benefit/ranking gained through internal linking + inbound links as opposed to scenario where there is no relevant internal links at all). Conditions: Relevant anchor text used (or close contextual variation) Measuring impact on a single phrase (or relevant phrase variation) Internal links can be from unlimited pages on the same site (even site-wide) External inbound links can be only to the target page (disregarding inbound links to other pages). Disregarding layout based navigation as internal links and focusing on content based links only (contextual, editorial links). For example: Internal link ranking impact: 10% External link ranking impact: 90% Since this is a simplified model feel free to provide necessary clarifications below your estimate. Looking forward to your answers!
Link Building | | Dan-Petrovic1