Google has recently added a new URL Property to the list of Schema Markups that can be used in Google search. The new recommended author.url property is added to the article structured data documentation. 

What is the Author URL?

This property can be added to any of your article structured markup which will link to a web page that will uniquely identify the author of the article. The URL that links to the author can be their social media page, about me page, biography page, or any other page that identifies the author of the article. 

Are there alternatives to Author URL?

Google made the following comment in the help documents:

“You can use the sameAs property as an alternative. Google can understand both sameAs and url when disambiguating authors.“

Why did Google introduce this?

Google understands that there are many authors who write across multiple websites, and the introduction and implementation of author.url will give the search engine a way to identify the author who wrote other articles on a website. So if an author wrote an article for website A and B, this url property can assist Google to better understand the author’s footprint. The url property may be used for the new article carousel in the author knowledge panel or for other reasons not yet known to us as well. 

Google’s author panel will showcase some of the more recent articles written by a specific author, which will be published directly within the author’s knowledge panel.

“We’re rolling out a beta feature in Search to help people learn more about an individual journalist or author by more prominently highlighting their recent work.”

– Jen Granito Senior Product Manager, Search

Why should you care?

If your website publishes articles, this url property might benefit you. As of late, we are not sure whether Google will use it more broadly than just in the author knowledge panels, or perhaps use it to try to understand the expertise of an author across multiple websites. Maybe, and I did say maybe, this can help your site rank better in the long-term. 

Don’t forget to check out the importance of Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor as this will affect your website. 

Tags: digital marketing, google