One SEO Professional was concerned about their author implementation.
They were curious about how their author page was set up. They have different paragraphs for every author on their About Us page.
They wanted to know if it would be okay to create anchor text links for every author on this page, and if they could use these links for the author URL property.
They also asked if it had to be a dedicated page for each and every author.
John replied that Google doesn’t have any guidelines specifically around doing something like this.
He also explained that it’s more about whether it makes sense for your users as opposed to a specific technical implementation.
The only thing he would caution the SEO pro about was making sure that Google knows more about how individual authors fit into the overall website.
This would include things like how the author links their different profiles together. Or, perhaps the author plans to use that one profile across the entire web.
In this case, John explained that he thinks it best that there are individual URLs.
However, for use purely within a single website for informational reasons, the structure that the author proposes above is just fine.
This happens at approximately the 7:38 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
Now then a question about authors, a question regarding author dot URL and structured data. On our About Us page, we have different paragraphs for every author. Would it be okay to make anchor links for each author on this page? And use these anchor links for the author URL property? Or does it have to be a dedicated page for every author?
John 8:01
I don’t think we have any guidelines specifically around that. So this is something where it’s less a matter of their technical requirements for how you link your authors. And more a matter of “Well, it has to work well for users.” So that’s kind of the focus that I would use there. So like, if this is a page that works well, where it makes sense that authors can, or people can find information about the authors on your website, then that seems fine.
The one thing I might caution here a little bit is that sometimes for individual authors, it makes sense for us to understand a little bit better how that author fits in overall. And for that, often these authors link their different profiles together, or they pick one author profile that they use across the whole web.
And for that kind of scenario, I think it does make sense to have individual URLs for each author. But if this is purely within your website, and purely for informational reasons for users, then probably that would be perfectly fine like that.
