One of the toughest Google Authorship troubleshooting requests we get at the Google Authorship and Author Rank community on Google+ concerns misattribution of Authorship in Google search results.

Misattribution (Google Search showing an author photo of someone other than the actual author of a content piece) occurs because over the past year-and-a-half or so Google has become more aggressive in trying to attribute Authorship. In many cases, Google will take what appears to be an "educated guess" at the author of a piece.

But sometimes, the fault of misattribution is more the site's responsibility, and that's when some careful troubleshooting (ok, outright sleuthing!) can often uncover the problem.

Here's an example mystery attribution that we were able to track down and solve:

Community moderator Ann Smarty asked us to look at this result for a search for "Time-Saving Apps for Social Media Promotion":

A very nice Google Authorship rich snippet search result, right? Only one problem. Nwosu Mavtrevor is not the author of that article! A woman named Anna Fox is, as the author box at the bottom of the article clearly displays:

So how did Google switch authors?

Step one in our investigation was to do a quick on-page search to see whether Mr. Mavtrevor's name appeared anywhere on the same page as Ms. Fox's article. In the majority of mis-attribution cases it turns out that Google grabbed the displayed author from that author's name appearing somewhere on the content page.

Sure enough, there was Mr. Mavtrevor, early in the post's comment thread:

But out of all the commenters on that page, why did Google latch on to his name for attributing authorship to the page? His comment isn't even the first one in the thread.

Perhaps Mr. Mavtrevor has claimed Authorship for the same domain. So our next step was to search for him on Google+. Thankfully he has a rather unique name, so we quickly located his Google+ profile.

Sure enough, Mr. Mavtrevor has the netmediablog.com site listed in the Contributor To section of his profile links:

The Contributor To section of a Google+ profile is where Google looks for content that the profile owner claims to have authored. The other half of the required two-way linkage is a link back from that domain to the same Google+ profile.

So why has Mr. Navtrevor put Netmediablog in his Contributor To links? Because he legitimately is an author there!

Mystery solved! Er...not so fast...

Normally at this point, I would declare case closed and ask my Mr. Watson to write it up in his journal. But there's more to this case.

Usually a misattribution like this where two people have linked their Contributor To to the same site occurs when the page author does not have a clear byline on the page. Google's recent Authorship FAQ recommends "[s]howing a clear byline on the page, stating the author wrote the article and using the same name as used on their Google+ profile." Doing that usually clears up most misattribution problems of this type.

But not in this case. Ms. Fox has a byline at the top of the article, and the name exactly matches her Google+ profile name:

So what gives now? How could Google possibly misattribute this article when it appears that every clue to its real authorship is right there on the page?

The answer was just a click away.

Page vs. domain authorship

Google allows for there to be a "default" Authorship for a site. Usually this is the Authorship profile (if any) associated with the home page of the domain.

When we clicked on Anna Fox's byline on her article, instead of going to a unique author page for her as we expected, the link takes us to the blog's home page. And the source code for the home page shows that Mr. Mavtrevor has his authorship markup on it, and thus is seen as the default author for site.

So it was our conclusion that Google followed the byline link to the home page and picked up the authorship attribution from there.

An ounce of prevention

Let's get to some practical takeaways from this investigation that can help prevent Authorship misattribution, particularly for multi-author sites.

1. Give each author on your site a unique author page. Most up-to-date Wordpress themes and frameworks (such as Genesis) include the option to set up unique author pages (under the Users tab). These templates automatically create a byline on each page created by a certain author, and the byline automatically links to that author's author page. When this is the case, each author only needs to link to her or his Google+ profile once from their unique author page (and of course, link back from the Contributor To section of their G+ profiles) and they are done. Google will follow the links from their bylines to their author pages to their G+ profiles.

If your site doesn't have such a theme, you should consider coding in author pages that are linked to by each author's content.

2. Make sure each author's byline name exactly matches her or his Google+ name. As mentioned above, Google now recommends that as a best practice. In most cases where we've seen misattribution just adding the byline name (in the form "by firstname lastname"), and placing it at the beginning of the content, are enough to correct the problem. The only reason that didn't work in our test case above was the fact that the byline linked to the site's home page.

3. Avoid using domain authorship attribution. Even though many themes and plugins (such as the popular Yoast SEO Plugin) offer the option to set up authorship for the home page/domain, we now recommend against using it. Google recently made clear that Authorship should only be applied when "[t]he URL/page contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or single piece of content, by the same author. This means that the page isn't a list of articles or an updating feed." In addition, they noted that, "Authorship annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real person’s perspective or analysis on a topic. Since property listings and product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using authorship in these cases"

Since home pages, and about pages and such don't fit the descriptions above, authorship is not intended for them. My concern in light of these guidelines is primarily with watering down one's Author Rank (if and when that becomes a reality). But in terms of our present topic, I also believe that refraining from attributing authorship to a homepage or entire domain will help avoid misattribution issues of the type we saw above.

Conclusion

Google Authorship is an evolving product. It has already gone through some major changes since the summer of 2011 when it first went public. We can expect that as time goes by Google will get better and better at correct author attribution. In the meantime, though, it is best to be vigilant for misattributions of your content, and to employ a triage similar to the one we walked through in this post when they happen. Follow the best practices we outlines above, and there's hope that you'll head those issues off before they happen.