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Google Authorship & Publisher – What’s The Difference?

Blog PosGoogle Authorship and Publisher - the differences between them

I get asked this question quite a bit from clients who are unsure about the difference between Google Authorship and Publisher and when they should use each one. If you’re anything like me, you probably like an analogy or two and so I’ve got an analogy for your relating to Authorship and Publisher – and an infographic! Buckle up..

So, let’s just jump right in. My analogy for Google Authorship and Publisher is a magazine full of articles written by different authors. Authorship markup should only be used for content written or created by a person.

Publisher is to do with the collective or whatever magazine (or site) houses all the content written by authors. Authorship shouldn’t be used for static pages, ie pages on your site talking about services or your homepage as they aren’t really authored but rather are published. They are pages that are used to promote or give more information about the collective as opposed to a unique piece of content authored by someone.

On this site for example my homepage has no author but it is published by the RobertRyan.ie GooglePlus business page however all of my blog posts have both Authorship AND Publisher in place. That is because blog posts are authored by me, the living, breathing and blogging Robert Ryan and are associated with my personal Google Plus page. Each blog post has Publisher mark up in place because each post is part of the collective, or site, that is RobertRyan.ie. Similarly, every single page on my site has publisher in place.

Following on from the magazine analogy, one magazine can have articles from lots of authors and so your site can have lots of blog posts authored by different authors – and all published under one publisher account.

Google Authorship & Publisher – What’s The Difference?

With regards to the benefits of using Google Authorship and Publisher they are quite similar. Like the infographic shows using Authorship and Publisher will allow images to be displayed in the SERPs which can help with:

…all of which are good stuff.

Having Authorship in place could also be increasing your Author Rank – the jury is still out on this one but you’d have to think that Google will have something in store for Authorship and Author Rank. If there isn’t a direct link between the two now, odds are there will be later. Disregarding the potential benefits of Google Authorship and Publisher that may be coming down the tracks there are already plenty of benefits associated with using them.

Also, just recently Google have now made it possible to check how your Authored posts are faring in the Google by adding it to Web Master Tools in the labs section – if you haven’t checked your Authorship stats before, do it now, feel the rush of stats!

Google Authorship & Publisher – How To Set Up

At this stage you may be wondering how you can go about getting Google Authorship and Publisher set up for your own site. I was going to do a guide for you but Craig Fifield has already done a beast of a guide on how to set up Google Authorship – well worth checking if you’ve any questions.

If you’ve tried to get Google Authorship in place but have had little luck thus far then Mervik Haums has got your back with this great infographic checklist about Why Google Authorship isn’t Working. Finally, if you want more info on Authorship, track down Mark Traphagen and read everything he writes!

Anyway – do you have a better understanding of the differences of Google Authorship and Publisher? I really hope you do but if you’ve any questions just comment below and I’d be happy to help if I can..

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