Read...but learn by doing!
I am currently receiving more inquiries than ever about what factors into the comparisons and associations apparent in authorship, enabling a given listing to stand out from the crowd in the SERPs. People want to pinpoint a cause and effect scenario. People want answers.
SEO is like life. We cannot always give an explanation or find a scientific solution to questions being asked of us.
For some time, I have been studying the application of algorithms in respect to human behaviour, animals and nature. Seven years ago, my fascination in complex adaptive systems was born, and my particular interest has been in social behavior. I have studied scientists and scientific publications to find "the most connected scientist" considering the citations and links found in the papers. What I hadn't predicted was the explosion of interest in and application of complex adaptive systems that I am now witnessing, nor that tasks in this area would become part of my daily work as a scholar, increasing my fascination with search engines.
Google and other search engines are trying to explore the relationship between man, his experience, and his contextual thought process in order to understand his reasons for taking certain actions. This tendency towards humanisation, and therefore to the unforeseeable nature of a complex system, generates countless theories, false positive and wrong analysis of the algorithms being studied.
SEO: Curiosity, determination, research and particular attention to detail
In this post, I want to clearly state that I am not here to criticise nor attack anyone. Using a scenario commonly confronted by SEOs, I want to demonstrate how it is possible to identify problems, to assess content being churned out daily by the international community, to verify a hypothesis, reach a conclusion and then formulate a correct opinion from what has been learned. Please bear in mind, an opinion is all we can strive for in the absence of facts. I believe that we often accept what we read, hear and analyse as solid fact.
All too often, the analysis of specific SEO problems misses the target due to insufficient depth of study and because there are no isolated variables subjected to examination. The recent release of Penguin and Panda has created a great deal of uncertainty and many interesting case studies, but few studies have made a meticulous effort to identify the real motives for which the penalties are imposed.
What I present here is a simplified approach to the analysis of updates such as Penguin and Panda, but it will allow you to identify what are the causes that often lead to conclusions because of the desire to obtain a justification for the same process used to reach those same conclusions. In addition to identifying possible problems during the analysis, I will also look into Authorship markup, Google+ and Rich Snippets. I would appreciate community feedback, particularly if you can point out other cases that contradict my findings.
The case under consideration: "Authorship"
"Everything You Need To Know About Google Authorship in 8 Minutes" is an interesting, investigative example which, unfortunately, fails to hit the target.
All hypotheses and insights that Chris Countey expressed in the video can be abolished in a matter of minutes by analysing more cases, more SERPs, more data. An analysis of this type leads to superficial conclusions and a message that misleads readers or listeners, potentially causing future SEO disasters.
Rel=Author, Rel=Me and HTML4 or 5
There is no evidence that doctype and use of rel or of ?rel affect attribution or non-attribution of Authorship. In the example below, you can see how a doctype HTML4 together with rel=author and rel=me all function normally. Judging by past history, Google is not prone to taking doctype into consideration.
Rel=Author and Profile Images
Here, too, there are various interpretations which have to be considered. I have made some tests, taking into consideration the following factors:
- Avatars with illustrated graphics
- Generic images and lack of focus on the face
- Images with more than one person
- Images without any person or face
- Images that are not sharp/clear
- Images that are of a low quality
- Authority of the profile
Let's examine these details further.
Avatar Image Illustration
As we can see from the following two files, there is absolutely no evidence that a profile picture or cartoon-style illustration prevents the display of same in the SERPs.
Negative case
Positive case
Generic images which do not focus on the face
As clearly visible from the following images, there is absolutely no evidence that a profile picture that doesn't focus on a human face prevents the display of same in the SERPs.
Famous positive case
A less famous positive case
Image with more than one person
Here is a screenshot of an avatar with two faces.
Positive case
Image without face or persons
This could be a plausible hypothesis, but evidence is to the contrary.
Negative case
Positive case
Image is not sharp/clear and the image is of low quality
If we followed Google's own advice about image quality, we might hypothesise that poor image quality could prevent display of an avatar in the SERPs. The following image, Keep Calm and Circle Me, renders even this hypothesis doubtful, however.
Sharp image but not quality
Quality image but lacks clarity
Here we can see the same image as above (Image without face or persons - Positive case), which is very clear despite of its very low quality and not being sharp.
Positive case
Authority of the profile
A possible factor which excludes the face could be related to the authority of the profile, but again, evidence is against such a hypothesis.
Negative case
Positive case
NB: The case of John Mu could be dependent on the fact that more than one profile is open (which is a type of filtering of fake hypothesis?) but I think it's image related. This authorship is associated with a different profile from that shown above.
- https://profiles.google.com/johnmu.com/about
- https://plus.google.com/113006028898915385825/posts
No firm conclusions, but a conclusion
The above cases illustrate and validate a rule to detect possible instances of non-display, leading us to an important conclusion; namely, that if you search for your "first and last name Google" or even "site: plus.google.com in url:TUO_ID_GOOGLE_PLUS " and Google does not display your profile image on Google+ within the snippet in relation to your Google+ page, it will most likely never appear.
Related to this we can say, without any doubt, that the image/photo of the profile is the main factor; something confirmed also by the following example here below (and by other tests I did as well).
Authorship with or without implementation through email?
When analysing other sites, it is always difficult to draw conclusions. A case that could be misleading is, for instance, the following example that does not use any markup on the page but gets authorship recognition in the SERP. A superficial judgment is to assume that Google is not interested in the rel="author" implementation, whereas it is very probable that the email confirmation option has been used.
So before jumping to conclusions, let's carefully evaluate each small possibility while moving forward.
Authorship and rel=nofollow to Google+ profile
Also in the video shown earlier in this post, it is noted that an author does not show in the SERPs despite everything being correctly associated. Specifically, Chris asked Rand why the link to his Google+ profile contained the rel=nofollow, imputing the missed authorship to this.
To eliminate this theory takes very little effort and you can verify for yourself that using a url as the nofollow does not prevent attribution.
Case of nofollow on link to g+
Possibly in the case described in the video, related to the article "How Authorship (and Google+) Will Change Linkbuilding", the missed authorship is not to be attribute to the use of the nofollow, as the screenshot shows.
Related to the screenshot above (from the earlier video), among the possible reasons for the absence of Authorship in the SERPs may be:
- Search Plus Your World is active (in order to test the Authorship attribution, it is preferable to be logged out).
- Now Google shows the image of an Author only once per SERP, and probably in the example the second attribution prevails over the first (however this is not the case, because the "by ..." should remain visible).
- The type of search query realized (which is not reported in the video).
- Social search and therefore the sharing of our friends were considered more relevant than the author in this case.
I am currently investigating the file robots.txt and I am unable to resolve or find anything.
Authorship and meta robots noindex on the author page
To verify the noindex case, I made a test with the result that the noindex in the author page is a big issue for the attribution even if the rich snippet testing tool returns an ok.
In the image below I present three pages of the same site, where one is using the author page with noindex. Just with a look at the SERPs, we can confirm that a noindex tag on the author page is a real issue.
Authorship and tab +1 on Google+ profile
Forums and posts that I have read provide some advice on making public the tab +1 to ensure authorship works. Unfortunately, this is not actually one of the factors that should be taken into account.
Authorship + snippet with number of circles
Another element that we can observe is the number of circles in which an author is present. This element seems depending mainly on two factors:
- The total number of circles in which the author is added has to be >500 [BEFORE 13 June, 2012];
- The association between the author and the search query.
Here we can see some examples where it appears or does not appear snippet 'in XXX searches'.
Comparison between the account with Circles number >500 and <500 with related search (first name and surname)
Thanks to this research it is possible to understand the value of the number of circles in which a user is present and, therefore, if this data will appear in the Authorship snippets or not.
Experiment with research and behaviours related to snippets
Borderline case to verify that the limit is effectively >500
To accomplish this I was able to find an account with 490 searches and one with 515 searches, undertaking a related search to both. To swiftly identify users of around the 500 searches, I utilised this tool.
With 490 circles, the number of circles is not displayed
With 515 circles, the number of circles is displayed
Relevance of search and number of circles
In this case, if the other authors were circled by >500 people probably they would obtain the additional snippet as in my case.
Case which shows the relevancy and the number of circles
In the following case, however, you can see how the additional element may quite probably depend on the relevance of the search. In the case above, in fact, I show up with the circles number snippet, but if I search for a different name where I appear (case below), but I'm not so relevant, then the number circles snippet disappears.
Case to which there is no relevance and therefore without snippets of circles
Continuous changes
Making the same search of 28 May on 6 June, I saw a big change that invalidates my first hypothesis. I'll show you what this was:
Marginal factor or not?
It is only a stupid meaningless number, or does it mean something more? Personally I consider that that "little number" may help us understanding the great complexity that lies behind Authorship and Search, because it clearly indicates how Google is able to associate, understand and contextualise people to searches.
Authorship, YouTube and rich snippet mixed
Many believe that Authorship in the SERPs consists merely of the visualisation of the face and description snippet, but this is not so. Authorship is expressed more specifically with the snippet "by Firstname Lastname". This allows us (as shown in the example below) to connect YouTube to Google+ and obtain the Authorship in SERPs merged with the video snippets.
In the image we can see a rich snippet showing the video uploaded by Giorgiotave with the Authorship snippet below along with a smaller image. This allows us to see how the SERPs are becoming more and more expressive.
In regard to the variety of snippets and their display, I consider very interesting reading this paper about social annotations and Web Search, which - on a macro level - describes in detail the study process implied with each small addition to the interface of a Search Engine, while - on a micro level - describes the effects that the social annotations have on the behaviour of the users and how it varies at any smallest change.
Contains multi-author verified and unverified
In the following examples, I've added more links of authorship (using ?Rel=author) comparative to a post with questionable content. I'm looking to understand what would happen in a scenario where pages with several authors including both profiles are unverified by 'contributor of' and others instead being verified. In the example shown, two profiles are verified while the remaining four are unverified.
Test multi author with unverified and verified
Google has apparently ruled out the authorship of the post due to the probability that the primary link of authorship does not confirm the association override and does not proceed to search for successive theory [hypothesis].
Let's evaluate what is effectively so and perform a test on the same post dismissing the authorship, by not confirming prior to firstly using the rich snippet testing tool to confirm and verifying revalidate.
Multi author first verified and then unverified
Apparently, the assumption seems to be founded, but to confirm the hypotheses we must obviously perform a similar test on a new post. This will enable us to see what happens in the SERPs. Here is a test with two authors verified.
Contains multi author with two authors verified
I carried out a test introducing an article with two verified authors. Unlike the day before, the rich snippets testing tool encountered an error identifying the rel=publisher as if the author were not verified, although no errors were implemented.
Two authors and one page badge
Contradicting the hypothesis above, but not as expected, the use of two verified authors using rel=author+ page author+ rel=me causes missing visualisation of the authorship in SERP even if the fault seems attributable due to the badge of the pages:
- Perhaps a bug in the rich snippet testing tool?
- That the rich snippets testing tool considers the first g+ URL before any other url?
- The search engine will have the same behaviour of the tool?
This notification is absurd. This invalidated the test and so we had to perform a new test.
Test with two verified authors: one via ?Rel=author and one via rel="author"+page author+rel="me"
In this case, the rich snippets testing tool catches (and show) the first author that it finds in the html code of the page, but in the SERP there is no attribution, as evident in the image below (in the red part).
More authors and no authorship
At this stage, our examination of new test should be in place:
- Test with two authors verified via ?rel=author,
- Test with two authors verified via rel="autor"+ page author+ rel="me" and without URL plus present Google in the page.
What response would Google provide in the case of failure to display?
In this help article, Google suggests that there are alternative cases for which the author may not appear in the SERPs. Surely, one of the elements to observe is that of the relative "on-page markup" as well as "profiles picture" discussed above.
The official support from Google
What can we learn from this case?
Regardless of the specific case and the assessments evaluated on rel=author, this case analysis shows us how we should act when we wish to obtain certain answers about the behaviour of the search engine. Therefore, we can define some key principles for the work we do every day:
- Collect information and cross examine it with a critical mind.
- Search for other opinions and experiments related to the information you've found and cross examine it with a critical eye.
- Read the official documentation, not to consider it as evidence, but simply as a starting point to define your hypothesis.
- Formulate one hypothesis at any one time and place it into question. Involve colleagues and friends to examine the case so that you are able to provide further views and more cases.
- When you obtain a large amount of data and tests that are consistent, try to demonstrate the accuracy with reality and specific testing.
- Urgency is not an issue; if something does not or cannot prove your hypothesis due to the lack of feedback, begin again until your hypothesis is not refuted by the facts.
- If you can prove your hypothesis, make it public and prepare to be disproven.
SEO is a more than words. SEO is a common sense approach to the problems of everyday life.
And here's a present for you...
Hi Andrea,
congratulations on your first YouMoz (let be this the first of a long series).
I really appreciate the methodology you used and resumed at the end of your post, as it should be - IMHO - the way of doing research and analysis in order to understand better how Search Engines works.
And thanks for the specific study you did about the Authorship snippet and all its variation.
I am especially intrigued by the merge of YouTube rich snippet and Authorship, which shows how the latter one is not only a simple added snippet of information, but quite surely a new better way for Google to "classify" relevant results in the SERPs and to discriminate trusted and authority sources of information from weaker ones. Somehow, this kind of data are going to merge into a better understanding of what is valuable and what less.
Now... well, let see how the is used outside the SEO world and how much businesses will implement it.
Hi Gianluca and many many thanks for your support.
I hope to find interesting topic for future sharing here in Moz. I think that Google in making great improvements in person related topics and G+ is another great weapon in its hands.
I'm now investigating how the authorship can alter ranking based on the trust of the author, but it's a little more difficult than simple technical stuffs :)
I hope in a big adoption also outside the SEO world because this is a very important strategy in the long term.
webmastertools Labs has the author stats back!
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/labs-author-stats-1?hl=en
funny stuff especially because you can see for which websites you are contributed although i did not endorse it by setting up in the g+ profile
for instance:
https://www.google.nl/webhp?hl=nl#hl=nl&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:sem.twittergids.nl
it is not mentioned on my g+ profile:
https://plus.google.com/114163207395031733621/
there is also no author tag mentioned, just the word author is on the page
Hi,
What about the option where you can put the tag in the head, using the link element ?
Please advise.
great post
Thanks
David
What do you want to know exactly?
We had a discussion on this before in our community but we were not more aware how to use it ,It is great illustration i think.I will put into practice and make my g+ profile to my blog.Thanks
Hope it helps!
Andrea, I had been fighting Google for ages trying to get my authorship to show up in the SERPS. There is just so much conflicting information out there and while I finally got the markup correct and verified in the test tool, it would never work in the actual results.
I had been thinking that the problem might have been that I an only in about 30 or so Google + Circles.
Anyway, I worked through all your points and finally it burst into life. I'm now adding an author to one of my sites who is in zero circles - will be interesting to see if her photo shows up too.
Thank you for taking the time to post such useful information!
David
Thanks David!
As soon as the g+ profile is indexed with pics the Authorship should appear, but let me know what's happen in your test :)
Congratulations for your authorship!
Great post, Andrea.
As someone who has personally gotten several dozen authorship snippets to show up in the SERPs, here are some of my thoughts:
Regarding pictures that are not photos, my experience is that Google will stop showing your author snippet if it thinks it's not a photo. The "Keep Calm And Circle Me" example you gave is no longer showing in the SERPs.
I have had the same experience myself, where I will change my photo to an image, and it will show for a couple of weeks, then it will disappear after a while. Then, if I change it back to a photo, it re-appears again. I have repeated this multiple times, with the same results. Point being, just because you see an image showing in the SERPs does not mean it will be there forever, as there is a lag time before Google will remove an image after you change it.
Blurry and low quality images also do no show up as snippets in the SERPs. I have had several accounts where the images were blurry, and the pictures weren't showing up. Then, I changed the photo to a clearer pic, and the images started showing up in the SERPs within a few weeks.
So from my observations, Google is looking for clear photos or images of people (most likely looking for flesh tones and such to determine this) and will remove images that are low quality, or clearly not of people. Multiple people in the image works, as does high quality illustrations.
Thanks Takeshi.
I agree to all you wrote and infact your comment is a good summary of the post:)
As I replied to Paul above the high quality image of people is confirmed as you say and also the fast removal & restoration.
That I would call research! Detailed and proof rich - Thank you very much! I am sure, your effort has been appreciated very well by us and whole community!
Thanks Jungles...glad to know you liked it. A lot.
Hi,
It is really wonderful explanation about the authorship, i have implemented this thing before few days in my site and it is really good strategy. Over here you have give perfect ideas about the how to produce perfect images as our author mark up.
Hi blurbpoint,
very happy to hear that ;)
Posts that dissolve the passive mindset and urge everyone to explore the mechanics are superb.
You post is exactly that! Thanks for sharing this with us Andrea.
I'm very Happy you appreciate my post.
Thanks.
This is an excellent post, Andrea! I appreciate all of the time you've put into gathering data and examples, and I hope everyone learns the real lesson: don't assume anyone has the right answer, but use what people say to inspire your own research. Here's a follow up discussion on G+ by AJ Kohn
Again, great job!
Thanks Chris (here & on Twitter) again for appreciating my job.
I think that in the SEO world we must use critical thinking everytime & everywhere and always go deep. Your video inspired me a lot and give space to formulate a nice analysis.
Thanks for the long follow up you pointed...I'm gonna read it asap.
Excellent Article! Thank you for sharing. Can you by chance provide feedback on a site I'm working on? If you go to www.aerlawgroup.com, every page has the correct image when I share with Google+ except for the MEDIA page. It's the same code, so I'm not sure why the difference. Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks!
While I'm a little late to this article it seems, google authorship is still very timely and has been a strong focus to develop for our clients. We've had some success for a few local SEO clients and have seen a measurable rise in site traffic and lead conversations, so while we can't definitely prove that it's in relation to success with Google Authorship, I'm a firm believer.
Very much enjoyed reading this, keep'em coming.
Thanks
And I'm a believer too.
Thanks for your comment.
Hi Andrea! Thumbs up for this excellent post! I really like your analysis on Authorship, Google+ and Snippets. Keep up the good wok. I really hope to read more of your post.
Although in one sense this does look like an easy and nice method to use authorship, I'm wondering if semantic markup formats like RDFa, Microformats and Microdata offer a better solution. For example, with https://schema.org/Article from Microdata I could add way more data that I want, plus it allows me to pick my own data and not be limited to what my Google+ or Facebook profile tells about me.
Am I missing something, or is my argument invalid?
It's difficult for me to understand how it can be related to this post, but what you say in a certain way is correct. You can use every kind of structured markup to describe better your page, but if you want to use the Google Authorship you need a G+ profile (up to now) :)
You must never follow only Google rules, but best practices - and Structured Markup is a good thing.
Hi, good post.
I think it's been said already but we've had a lot of instances where a comment is overriding the author information of a post - this is definitely linked to gravatar as the commenters have no authorship info assigned.
Secondly, I've noticed authorship info appearing for Flickr images. I have been searching and searching but can't seem to work out why, any ideas?
Here's a search showing author info on Flickr.
I can say here that the Flickr case you show is a strongly connected one. What I mean? Or better what I suppose?
I supponse that here there are strong signals that the user profile on flicker is connectd to the g+ profile in a 2-way mode. Flickr link g+ and g+ link Flickr. The 2 way connection is the same for Twitter and Facebook so in this case in my Hypotesis Google is sure of what is doing and so is bypassing the rule!
This is a strange behaviour going on from about two week and as I stated above Google is trying to determine the authorship without any help from us. I think this is impressive and self explanatory of how many things Google knows.
As it happen in the categorization of links in a page Google can consider every single word it finds in a page and the same process can go on for the discovery of people inside an hypertext. In some case it can fail or make some mistake but in the long term I thing we will see less & less errors.
@ Andrea Pernici Great analysis! Infact I was looking for some great insights on Authorship mark-up and found your article very appealing and competent addressing some of my concerns. However I am still not getting how should I add multiple authors in a Wordpress blog. I will be glad if you could shed some light on it.
Second question is how should i judge if my WordPress theme supports multiple authors or not!
Hi Andrew and thanks a lot for your thumbs up!
A simple wordpress installation allows you to have a multi author blog. Usually you can use plugins (ie: Wordpress SEO by Yoast) or implement authorship in your theme like on any other website. It's not difficult and there are a lot of pages on the google webmaster guide on how to do it.
If you have a multi-author blog you can use our plugin. It's called AuthorSure - it uses the three way linking method - i.e from post to author page to Google profile and back to home page. It also optionally places rel=publisher on the home page and category pages. Works for single or multi-author WordPress sites.
Does anyone think Google can use rel authorship to tie content from the same author on different sites together? For example if I write on 10 blogs and my profile on those links back to my main site, Google sees this as 10 links from 10 unique IPs. If they all have rel author connecting them to me isn't there a chance Google could partially devalue those links?...In reality it is me linking to myself.
Google can!
But reasoning as you wrote assumes that you are making something not good. The power of authorship is in the trust that Google gives to a real person.
You are trying to game Google with your 10 IPs or you are adding value to your audience?
I think this is the question that need an answer before any other.
Right. I wasn't thinking the content is just made to "game" Google. They would be useful, informative posts. I was just pointing out the C-Class IPs because I don't think Google wants to reward people who link to themselves. In the past they have used IPs to address that but now they could potentially use rel author.
Yes you are right but is also true that if your contents are great your Author rank will be greater, and, I expect the Author rank will be more and more important in the next future.
I think you have to define priorities based on your content and link building strategy so you have to think what is better for your purposes.
If someone interested the Author Stats in webmaster tools are back again.
Here some more info https://giorgiotave.net/author-stats/.
Thanks - that's a useful and interesting article - thanks for sharing.
You are welcome :D
This is insane - probably one of the most researched posts I have seen in a long time. I really appreciate your findings from a developer standpoint as well as from a critical thinking SEO.
I came across this article while doing some research of my own where I have several users verified on one site as "admins" and the same on other blogs as editors or < admins and G not verifying. The hardest part is rallying up the effected bloggers and getting them to test cause and effect.
The larger picture here is really showing that Google is making us play in their playground, and penalizing those who do not actively subscribe to all/most of their products :)
Uh, too kind mate.
I'm very pleased you liked the approach.
We need to analyze in a very deep way from now on cause it will be more and more difficult to catch the various signals influencing SERPs.
Thanks and let us know your researches soon!
I setup everything, the result of Rich Snippet tool is correctly, but in the results of google search, my picture is not appear. Can someone help me to see what's the problem in my website?www.naestrada.org
tks
Gustavo
When did you set it up?
When did you change your G+ profile image?
Like I say in the infographic you G+ profile is not showing your image so if you changed it recently probably you have to wait some days, but if you changed it long time ago you need to change your image with a better one with no background caos.
Hi !!!tks for you reply.I already setup a few weeks ago. I changed already the picture like a 4 days ago.how can I check that: "infographic you G+ profile is not showing your image"?so....should I change the picture again?
tks
If you changed it 4 days ago try to wait some days more.
hey expert man !!! one of my websites appear my photo: ".: NaEstrada.org :.: Carta de Oração - Família Hellwig"
I run a file compare between two articles and looks like the same.
Why just that one?
tks man
You're on the right way...be patient and wait some days.
@ Andrea Pernici Great analysis! Infact I was looking for some great insights on Authorship mark-up and found your article very appealing and competent addressing some of my concerns. However I am still not getting how should I add multiple authors in a Wordpress blog. I will be glad if you could shed some light on it.
Second question is how should i judge if my WordPress theme supports multiple authors or not!
What about ranking Google+ pages as opposed to profiles? Any idea on what criteria you need to get G to pick up the page?
Hi MatildaRose.
For Google+ pages you should use rel=pubsliher. Try to look to my answer at AsadSalman comment above.
One thing I've noticed is that the images or rating stars show up differently in different searches, for the same page. I can point to a few different examples but one is if you look at a search for 'prepper opsec plan' I see my main post shows both my author pic and rating stars for the main article I wrote on the subject that has the same words in the title, whereas the category of .../opsec listed right below that shows no author pic or stars.
Compare that for a search for 'gray man opsec plan'
I find my .../opsec category page now shows with the author pic. With all my searches so far that I've seen with more than one of my pages showing in the SERP (at least the ones I've paid attention to), the first one showing has the author pic and no stars and the rest either show a small pic with stars, stars with no pic or neither stars nor pics. I also remember seeing the same page show up with different snippets showing depending on what my search is. Things also shift if I'm logged into any google account while searching.
Hey Andrea! Gratzie per tutti! Your study is very thorough, i appreciate that.
I got pretty scared when in your article you say:
´...that if you search for your "first and last name Google" or even "site: plus.google.com in url:TUO_ID_GOOGLE_PLUS " and Google does not display your profile image on Google+ within the snippet in relation to your Google+ page, it will most likely never appear...´
What do you mean by 'never appear'? You mean there's nothing i can do about it? I just have to wait for google to decide to publish my picture?
I've got a 'white hat' profile picture, i've done all the back and forth linking but i don't have any authority on google+. My pic is not showing up in SERPS. Of course i will keep on working on it, but i was rather moved by your phrase above. If you could tell me what you meant by it, i'd appreciate it.
Thanks again.
Hey Latigus,
I mean that you have to wait until your picture will show up. If it doesn't show up in 7-8 days try to change the image again.
Hi Andrea,
Thanks for your help on Twitter re: Google author pic in SERPs problem! I finally sorted out my problem. I also put together a blog post about exactly what I had to do - https://www.artdriver.com/google-author-pic-not-showing-up-solution-time/ thanks again!
I am very glad that my suggestion was helpful.
Thanks for your post!
Very interesting research......
I have my pic and author show up next to my page in the SERPs and I have NO tag of any sort. I only have a google+ badge on my site, and my site listed under my contributions. Not sure how exactly that data fits in with the rest, but I'd assume it disproves most of the variable of adding the rel=author tag.
It looks very interesting but each case need to be examinated carefully.
In the last two weeks (while the post was pending review) I saw lots of change in how Google try to catch the author, but with crazy errors. I think Google is trying to determine the presence of people inside a page and working to catch all the informations and interactions inside a single page and all around an entire website.
Probably Google is experimenting and this can cause some strange behaviour in serps and in author snippets.
Is very interesting to discover how google and where it search for authors informations without any apparent relation.
very helpful "must know" advice at the end. the most thorough post I have ever seen on seomoz! I wonder if the title is a bit bloated though?
Thanks for this kind of compliment!
Probably the title is a bit bloated, but it was very difficult to find an explanatory one with few words.
Hi Andrea - great delving here, thanks for your post although I agree with others here that a punchy post title would help attract the deserved attention this post merits!
I've also been debugging authorship implementations and agree it's fraught with difficulty especially as recently I think Google have adjusted aggressively how they assign attribution in edge cases.
I've also noticed non compliant avatars that continue to appear in the SERPs and I theorise that many of these, for example authors of tech blogs, gained authorship status during the manually approved period in 2011 and have since altered their avatars to non compliant versions. It is as if once conferred the authorship status there is room to inadvertently abuse the rules afterwards because the avatar check does not appear to be constant. Do you follow me?
The problem is probably with the Moz meta Title :) That is not chosen by me. I usually make mix between meta and post title but here I can't. I also think that the "Tweet text" is not so appealing, but it's my first time here and I don't know well the technical stuff of the Moz Submission fields.
Lesson learnt :) Thanks Paul.
I doubt that manual attribution you mention for 2011 can have an impact. I tested lots of authors and pics change, and I noticed that Google is very fast in removing and restorating the image in serps.
When talking about abuse I always think that it's only a question of time and I never recommend to anyone playing with Authorship.
So i took a closer look at the last example you cited Andrea with the multi author setup specifically https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fseoblog.giorgiotave.it%2Fbrowser-size-analytics%2F2357 and I've seen similar where a suboptimal page level blog setup then suffers from gravatar markup blog comments which confuse the rich snippets testing tool because of the syntax that wraps the code. In addition I think your page example has a lack of an author byline in the body of the page. I'm unsure if the page language has any effect here. However add the author bio and links within the body of the page with text links not just graphic icons and I bet your page would succeed at authorship.
The last example is different from the URL you choose.
The gravatar is not an issue and you can see it here and here. This is a problem of the Rich snippet testing tool caused by the google+ badge. You have always to think that the tool is very trivial and doesn't respect the real behaviour of the search engine...and it's confirmed by the various issues I described in the post.
The url you choose is related to more than one confirmed author in the same page and as described make the authorship misses.
Great detailed post Andrea! I feel that we can all appreciate the time you've put into researching and gathering the examples. Hopefully we can all learn something from this great write up.
Thanks Dubs for appreciating it.
Thanks a lot for such a detailed post. It really is rare to see individual variables isolated (to the extent this is possible) to explore relationships. Have you come across any studies or white papers with large sample sizes and significance testing? As more and more name searches are conducted on Google, it seems that authorship markup will continue to be an integral component of personal branding.
I'm very happy you liked my post.
I'm going deeper into the authorship to check if there is a real added value in terms of trust, but it needs lot of time and effort. What I can say is that I agree with your statement.
Wow, this is a great piece on authorship. Thanks for sharing.
Hope it helps.
somehow i have been awarded authorship for a website only mentioning my name in their twitter plugin on their website. https://www.google.com/search?q=on+site+search+sooqr ( the picture of me - Wouter Blom) has nothing to do with the website. I have not declared myself on the google+ page as a contributor.
i have also seen a example of another website not mentioning any author but it did receive the picture in the serps.
Test, test, double check, test test. Take your time, test & check
There are various cases where wrong authorship is assigned, but in many case it's related to some bug.
I saw cases where for new g+ profile the attribution fail but it's only a question of time.
The authorship markup is relatively new and related bugs easy to identify. Bugs are frequent in all the algo changes, but in most cases difficult to discover.
"To swiftly identify users of around the 500 searches, I utilised this tool."
Just wondering, could you provide a link to the tool? Many thanks and thumbs up for the post!
Sorry flo2 for the missing link.
Here it is: https://www.giorgiotave.it/tools/gplus-influencer/.
Added the link in the post too.
Great.
Thank you! Now let's see how good my Italian is :)
Impressive post Andrea!
I like the fact you checked in deep all these things, because it's cool to have a more broad knowledge about this topic, that is so hype at the moment.
The thing I know for sure, it's that my face appears under the URLs of my posts, and I am glad. :D
What I'm seeing sometimes for some sites it's that the avatar doesn't appear simply because they implement the authorship in the wrong way in the code. And trust me, it's a really common errors.
Thanks again for sharing!
Thanks Alessio.
Obviously the bad implementation error is the main one :)
Sometimes there are invisible factors that make the issues finding harder and so I tried to give an input for everyone.
I have started seeing amount of circles I am in in search results with 350 or so. Thus 500 might be not a hard number.
Hi giedrius. If you read the post you can see that the 500 number was valid 1 month and a half ago and then changed as shown in the "Continuous changes" chapter.
Great insight into the topic, I personally do not like setting up authorship, it's complex as it should not be. It is complex in terms of methods because of all available rel=author, rel=me, rel=publisher, ?rel tags plus the email verification methods. Anyway, in your post, you caught some remarkable cases or bugs. Can I have a version of tool in English without translation.
Thanks Nanky...we're going to provide a transalted tool asap.
Translated...check it out.
Thank you Andrea, for taking the time to put together such an interesting post. Including the screenshots was also very helpful.
Thank you for appreciating it...and here I show a subset :)
very nice article i take some knowledge for seo.
I'm very happy to know that it helps you.
Good post , I think Google + is important .
Thanks. I think so.
First time I come back to SEOmoz... Must have been the title! :) A very very interesting article indeed.
Very happy :)
Thanks for adding the last graphic in the post. Really brought everything together
You're welcome ;)
Great Research Andrea P and thanks for sharing the information ..... hope this authorship thingy will help us in SEO ... " I'm now investigating how the authorship can alter ranking based on the trust of the author "
will be waiting for your post which explains your investigation ....
Thumbs up for the post ... keep sharing ....
Thanks Ramakrishna G, when I'll collect a good amount of data I'll try to make a useful post.
NOTE:
I'm looking some strange things in SERPs related to author in the last two week :)
Things are changing very fast. I think google is really tuning something and try to go deeper in the identification of authors inside a page even without implementation and that are causing lot of errors in attribution.
Interesting, identification of an author without implementation? Madness! Things must be changing because yesterday I finally got an image showing in the SERPs for this one blog, and now it's disappeared (sad face). Very frustrating, wish I took screenshots.
Wow, great post and an in-depth read! I have been interested in this topic for a while and have been doing my own testing particularly with image quality, non-face pictures and nofollow. Have seen some very interesting results. I do not think there is a cause and effect between ranking and authorship, however I do believe it aids authority in Google's opinion and let's Google see posts can be trusted from a specific aurthor. I have seen better results while using authorship in 'fresh content' tests where content newly created shoots to top rankings for almost a day and then naturally falls down.
The only problem I see with Authorship is in brands starting to abuse it, you can literally place an offer or ad picture within the authorship pic, the whole concept was designed for individual authors to be recognised within the community.
Great to know that someone is testing with me!
When considering fresh contents we must be very careful in considering rankings cause there is a mix of factors to take in consideration.
Related to abuse i believe that is a non-sense cause soon it can become a boomerang.
Hey Andrea!
Hell of an awesome post, seriously!
Something I've played around with but didn't get much luck with is using trying to display brand logos in the SERPs.
I definitely didn't want to change the profile picture of a personal account to that of a logo.
Tried using the 'rel=publisher' tag.
And, as I mentioned earlier...no luck.
Any experience with that? Would really appreciate any insight you may have.
Hi Asad.
If you want to promote something that is not an Author you must use the rel=publisher and I guarantee you that you can have some result in serp, but differently from authorship.
You can see some examples of what can happen here...so don't give up.
NB: Remember that the publisher must be use for g+ business pages.