Google suggests to add author’s URL in the article schema
When several authors have the same or similar names, Google advises adding an author’s URL to article schema to aid in determining the proper author.
“August 6: Added a new recommended author.url property to the Article structured data documentation. The url property helps Google disambiguate the correct author of the article.”
To be clear, the author URL is not a new property. What’s new is the suggestion to utilise it to assist Google in determining the right author of an article.
Because the author URL attribute is contained within the Article schema, if you’re already utilising that markup on your site, it’s only one more field to add.
When disambiguating authors, Google states that the sameAs property can be used in place of the author URL, as Google understands both sameAs and URL.
There was no such option for aiding Google with author disambiguation prior to this upgrade. Google’s John Mueller has mentioned a reconciliation procedure in which the search engine checks for URLs in author bio pages to distinguish writers with identical names. This new approach of employing author URL schema markup appears to be more efficient.
Which URL Should I Include in My Author Markup?
Google does not define what type of URL the markup should refer to, for example, a social media link or a link to the author’s home website. However, it may be ideal for Google if the markup links to an author bio page on the same domain as the article.
“We expect some form of website information for many or most websites. We expect clear information about who (e.g., what individual, company, business, foundation, etc.) created the MC, unless there is good reason for anonymity. A long-standing Internet alias or username can also serve the same function as identifying the MC creator.”
Why? Because when manually reviewing webpages, Google’s Quality Raters are directed to seek for information about writers.
An “unsatisfactory” or “inadequate” quantity of information regarding who produced an item is cause for material to be rated as “low” or “lowest” quality. According to section 6.6 of Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines (MC = major content):
Although the rules do not expressly specify that “you require an author bio page,” it would be a highly effective approach to communicate who an author is to Google’s quality raters. The more information you can supply about an author, the more proof you can give Google that your material is of high quality.
Furthermore, an author bio page aids in author identification. Returning to the reconciliation approach I mentioned before, Mueller describes how social media links in bio pages might assist Google in distinguishing different writers with the same name:
“So my recommendation here would be to at least link to a common, or kind of like a central place, where you say everything comes together for this author. Which could be something like a social network profile page, for example, and use that across the different author pages that you have when you’re writing, so that when our systems look at an article and they see an author page associated with that, they can recognize this is the same author as the person who wrote something else. And we can kind of group this by entity, and we do that based on maybe this common social networking profile that is there.”
With that said, it appears that directing author URL markup to a bio page that links to their social network presence is the ideal approach. This will convey various signals to Google, which will aid in finding the proper author.
For authors, linking to the same social media profile on each website where you publish might assist Google in distinguishing you from another writer with the same name.
