How Google Recognizes content from the same author?

Through reconciliation techniques, different content on multiple platforms from the same author is generally recognized. During chat, Google John Mueller has been asked by a site owner what is important to include in an author’s page? Is the link of social media accounts or email address?

In order to give reply to this question, John Mueller has decided to describe how Google recognizes content from the same author. Different factors are taken into consideration on the occasion.

Here is the response from John Mueller

“Essentially what I see on our side is, when it comes to things like author pages, or information about the author, or information about entities in general behind a website, an article, or something, – what happens there is our systems try to recognize who that is, what that entity is, and we do that based on a number of different factors. And that does include things like links to profile pages for example, or visible information that we can find on these pages themselves.

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.”

In short, it is better to use social media page profile on the author page. On the occasion, the author has to be consistent with the link all over the web. This way, all the signals are directed to a central place such as the social media profile.

If a social media account is constantly linked with an author then it may be recognized by Google as the same entity with the various author pages.

Here, Mueller has also given reference of the structured data markup that is also known as authorship.

If you are new to SEO then you may not be aware of the term authorship. It can be simply looked as a markup that can be utilized by Google to know about the author of content.

Previously, photo of the author is used by Google also in the search result. However, it is certainly a matter of the past.

“Long ago we used to have the rel=”author” annotation, and all of the older SEOs will facepalm now, but it’s something essentially where we try to use structured data to explicitly apply this… the rel=”author” annotations are no longer used at Google for quite a while now, but we do try to understand who the entity is behind an author page. And for many authors it’s pretty clear there’s one name and it’s very obvious this one name is associated with this one person.”

Later on, Mueller has discussed about a complex situation as multiple people that has same name can have web page.
If social media profile link is not offered then Google may think that different people with the identical names is the same person.

It is said “For other people it can be a little more complicated. Like me, for example, John Mueller. If you search for me you’ll find Wikipedia pages, barbecue restaurants, bands, all kinds of people who are called John Mueller.

And if, on my site, I don’t specify who I actually am, then it could happen that our systems look at my page and go: “oh this is that guy that runs that barbecue restaurant.” And suddenly I’m associated with a barbecue restaurant, which might be a move up, I don’t know.

But these subtle things make it easier for us to recognize who is actually behind something. We call that reconciliation when it comes to structured data, kind of recognizing which of these entities belong together.”

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