Thread: Critical 4 Local - Author Rank, Publisher & Author Markup - What you NEED to Know

HI Linda,

Hope you are doing well!

So what is the best way to set up both and where should rel=author and rel=publisher appear in your website source code?


I use wordpress genesis site and have the Yoast seo plugin
**In the user section on WP there is the section to enter google Authorship link
**In the Yoast dashboard there is a place to enter google publisher link.


So when I check my source code…….I see rel=publisher only on the home page, however all my other wordpress Pages and Posts have rel=author.


Does that sound correct?

So sorry Nathan. I have so many mind numbing G+ L problems I'm helping so many folks with, that I don't have bandwidth to even think about all the author mark up stuff. So I'm def not the one to ask. But hopefully other members will step in to help you out.

Originally Posted by nathanksmith

So when I check my source code…….I see rel=publisher only on the home page, however all my other wordpress Pages and Posts have rel=author.

Does that sound correct?

Yes, that looks right, Nathan. Personally, I'm not a fan of adding rel=author to my site's main pages (about us, contact us, services, etc), but I guess that's a personal preference. But it looks like your WordPress plugin set it up correctly, with the publisher tag on the homepage and the author tag on the rest.

I'm keen to add the rel=publisher tag, but I just realised that due to the architecture of my site, the same header is added to each page so the publisher tag would appear on every page.

Will this be a problem? Should I re-engineer my site to ensure the publisher tag only appears once?

Thanks in advance gurus!

All of the gurus are busy, so you're stuck with me, Justin. lol What kind of site is it? Is is WordPress or does it use php for everything?

I use PHP to assemble the pages David, so that the header (including navigation menus) and footer are uniform site-wide, which makes updates a lot easier.

I'm sure I can implement a work-around, but is it worth my time?

Well, you really only want the publisher tag to be on your site's main page, which is usually the homepage. But could you please tell me what's the name of your site? I'll look around and see if I can come up with some ideas.

Thanks David. My homepage is here.

Justin, I checked out your site and here's what I found: your homepage has the rel=publisher tag, and everything looks good there. Your other pages have the rel=author tag, and those look fine, too. I didn't check every single page, but I didn't see any instances where both tags appeared on the same page, so you're good there, too, because you don't want to use both tags on the same page.

I also saw that you have created a reciprocal link between your Google+ personal page and your site for the rel=author tags and have linked your Google+ Local page to your site, too. So basically, you have done what you were supposed to do and everything looks good.

Here's the one thing that I am not sure about, though: for the rel=publisher tag, usually the link between a website and a Google+ page is made through the Google+ Business page, not a Google+ Local page, as yours is. There is no method of linking and verifying a website on a G+ Local page as there is with a G+ Business page. So when I checked your pages with Google's Structured Data Testing Tool, I can see the link between your website and your G+ Local page, but it is not verified. So the question is, will the rel=publisher tag still function as intended? I'm trying to find out and will update everybody as soon as I do.

If you want to check your site's pages to ensure that the author and publisher markups have been set up correctly, just drag this link to your bookmarks bar. Go to the page that you want to check, click on the bookmark, and you'll see the results of Google's structured data testing tool.

Google Authorship Bookmarklet

If the author or publisher tags have been set up correctly, you should see a message that says "verified" and also see the link to your Google+ page.