Google’s John Mueller answered a question about whether author profiles affect their EAT scores. John first pointed out that there is no such thing as an EAT score, and then offered some suggestions, indirectly providing insights on how Google views the author profile page.
Author archive page
The author profile page is a page that lists articles published by individual authors of the site. These pages can be used to list the author’s achievements and certificates.
This also helps readers find more articles by their favorite authors.
Google’s Mueller discusses author profile pages and EAT
Is it okay to have an unindexed author file?
The person who asked the question pointed out that they had a structured data markup error, and they are considering preventing Google from indexing their author pages in order to prevent the error from appearing in Google Search Console.
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The way to prevent Google from indexing web pages is to use so-called non-indexed meta tags. The non-index tag is an HTML element that tells search engines not to include a webpage in their index.
However, the people who asked the question worried about whether their ranking would be affected.
There is an idea in the SEO community that author archive pages may be a factor related to ranking.
There is a way to understand web pages based on professional knowledge, authority, and credibility (EAT), and believe that these qualities of web pages are ranking factors.
They are not actual ranking factors, they are just the quality of the types of pages that Google wants to rank for.
Therefore, the person who asked the question was concerned that preventing Google from indexing these pages would have a negative ranking impact.
The man asked:
“Are they important to EAT?
If I don’t index the author archive pages, will my EAT score drop? “
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Did not eat points
Google’s John Mueller broke the myth that EAT scores exist.
John Mueller explained EAT:
“So we don’t have an EAT score.
So from this perspective, you don’t have to worry. “
Non-indexed pages will make Search Console errors disappear
Mueller next suggested that by not indexing these pages, the structured data notification messages in the search console will disappear to some extent, and the problem will be resolved.
John Mueller recommends:
“If you do not want these pages to be indexed, then by not indexing these pages, you will also delete the notice.”
Non-indexed author pages are generally good
Mueller is still discussing the topic of solving the problem of structured data misconfiguration. He said that if these pages are not important, not ranking, and not important to the publisher, then deleting them is completely fine.
Mueller recommends:
“My guess is that the structured data you use on these pages is not important to your website, and we won’t show it directly in search results anyway.
Therefore, from this perspective, you may be able to remove structured data from these pages, and if these pages are not important to your site, then they will not be indexed.
All of these will be fine. “
When not to use non-indexed author pages
Generally speaking, if author pages are a super important factor related to ranking, Mueller may urge caution in deleting these author pages. But he did not urge caution, he said it was okay.
But then he explored the circumstances in which these author pages might not be deleted.
Mueller provided his insights:
“If I know that this is a website that places great emphasis on authority and knowledge types and the author’s name, if people actively search for the author’s name there, I think I’ll see that this is slightly different, then the content collected by the author may actually be relevant to the search The results are useful.
So for those types of websites, I think it’s useful to keep the index.
However, you may already want to index them because they are getting traffic from search.
Therefore, if you don’t see any traffic to these author pages at all, and they are just random people writing for your blog or similar content, you may not be able to index them. “
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Author page has nothing to do with ranking?
An interesting thing about Mueller’s answer is that the main consideration for not building an index has nothing to do with whether the site is a sensitive topic that may affect people’s finances (banking, credit, mortgages) or health. .
Another interesting point is that Mueller also failed to mention any ranking-related considerations related to the author’s archived pages.
According to John Mueller, an important consideration is whether the webpage gets traffic and is it so important to readers that they will actually search for the author’s name.
The decision to not index author pages depends on whether these pages are important to site visitors.
When answering whether to not index author pages, Mueller’s answer did not mention any considerations related to ranking or EAT.
More importantly, Mueller again affirmed that there is no such thing as an EAT score.
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Citation
Will unindexed author files affect EAT?
Watch John Mueller discuss the author profile and EAT tags at 48:01 minutes
