Google Creates Author Confusion

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Neil_Shearing

Google has started to support the “author” markup tag so that when you create a link, you can tell Google that you’re the author of the content you’re linking from.

We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

But, as many people have pointed out in forum threads and blog comments, the current implementation only works within a website. So you can link from one page on your site to another page on your site saying you’re the author of the content by using a rel=”author” tag. Well, big deal. You can already do that by the mere existence of the link itself saying something like, “click here for my author page”, or “click here for my other articles”.

Google, figure out a way for content creators to claim ownership and “authorship” so that scrapers can’t outrank them in the SERPS, please. How about using rel=”unique” and your timestamp on discovery of the document? I’m sure that would catch on pretty fast… and I know you index my pages almost before I’ve finished writing them! WordPress, Blogger and other CMS’s could add the tag by default, but for duplicate content the timestamp would be the deciding factor for who gets authorship credit.

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3 Responses to Google Creates Author Confusion

  1. Di says:
    June 9, 2011 at 10:11 pm

    Hi Neil,

    Totally agree about the timestamp – it’s basic, why can’t it be implemented? Or is it that G doesn’t really care about duplicate content?

    Best regards, Di

    Reply
  2. Veena Furtado says:
    June 11, 2011 at 5:11 am

    Hi Neil,

    I posted an article on some article directories and within a matter of it going on the net, it was copied by many websites without my name or my link. Something should be done about things like this.

    Regards.

    Veena Furtado

    Reply
    • Neil_Shearing says:
      June 13, 2011 at 8:43 am

      I have seen the same thing with my articles. People can easily remove the attribution link with scraper software, as sold on Clickbank and elsewhere by “gurus” who are shameless. One such piece of software didn’t even have the OPTION to give attribution until I said it should be added… which it was, with a checkbox. /sigh

      Reply