Schema structured data is a vocabulary created by Google to help disambiguate content and entities for its search engine. Editors use it to define article details and attributes, and an essential part of this structured data is the author schema.

As more publishers add Schema structured data to their articles, Google discovered that some developers were not structuring the data properly. The most recent problem concerns the type of author. These issues prompted the Google Research team to publish new best practices for author markup.

The biggest issues that Google had with author markup were:

1. incorrect merge of multiple authors in the same author field
2. not including enough details about the author
3. not using the correct schema type (person) for the author

Here are examples of properly formatted author markup based on best practices recently released by Google.

Single author best practice markup

Markup best practices for multiple authors

Using the correct implementation of author markup will help Googlebot correctly parse and use the author(s) details of each article. It can also trick Google into displaying the author’s name in a rich result.

Jon Henshaw

Jon is the founder of Coywolf and the IEC and senior reporting writer for Coywolf News. He is an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience in digital marketing and internet technologies. Follow @henshaw