Really, to be fair to Google, the title should read “when the application of Google web authorship goes wrong”. Maybe I will change the title. Maybe I will change the header! Maybe I will do nothing ….
I will meant to keep this brief as I need to stop working and spend some time on the sofa ….
Over on Cre8asiteforums someone asked “Any Problems With Seo And Using Magento?“. I was curious so googled [magento seo] and the first result was:
I scanned through the article, it looked like a pretty good guide and I use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress so automatically felt that this was a trustworthy article on the topic, so linked it up in the forum, explaining why I shared that specific link with the words: “this chap did a good SEO plugin for WordPress, so probably worth reading what he has to say about Magento“.
Then I started reading in a little more detail and even managed to get to the bottom of the page, where the author was mentioned – “This article was a guest post by Joachim Houtman“.
Now, I am sure Joachim Houtman knows his stuff, certainly sounds like it, but the reason I read and then shared the article was because it had Yoast’s name on it.
Guest Blogging Best Practice
Now, I was guilty of doing exactly the same once myself. So now whenever I publish a guest post I use a “Guest Blogger” account rather than mine. That way the guest posts are not classified as my work.
Is this “best practice”? No idea, but it is simple enough to set up and works for me.
Now, you could argue that Yoast, as site owner and editor, fully endorses the work of Joachim Houtman and therefore we can assume its quality matches, or even exceeds, that of Yoast’s own work. However, it does seem that the authorship system has been failed in this instance. And maybe Joachim Houtman has been failed too.
Joachim Houtman
For the sake of fairness and balance, here is a little tiny bit about Joachim. He is the Benelux director of Remerce.com, an SEO and web marketing agency. According to his twitter page he likes “eCommerce, Magento, rowing, cycling”, but there have been no updates since November 2011, at least @wjhoutman.
He is a has written other articles for Yaost on Magento, these are under his own account: http://yoast.com/author/joachim.
According to SEO Moz he spends around 15 hours a week on SEO, but he is not active on that community (5 points).
He was a speaker at the Meet Magento conference in May 2012 (2pm in the business talks) – meet-magento.nl/programma/
So, he knows his stuff alright, so all is well. But I just spent way to long verifying his authority on the topic!
