Person Schema’s Impact on Understanding Entities and Authorship

Content on the web is being generated at a faster rate than ever before, especially with the advent of AI-based content generators. As a result, Google is utilizing more ways to understand which content is truly authored by an expert and should ultimately be trusted.

Thanks to Google updates, including the Helpful Content Update and the new expansion of E-E-A-T, understanding the authorship behind a piece of content has become more important than ever.

Person Schema’s Role in Establishing Entities and Credibility

When a piece of content is published on the web, Google attempts to understand who the author and publisher are. Having your company name and author listed on the web page may not always be enough. For example, the author's name, e.g., Jane Smith, is likely not unique, as many other individuals worldwide (and on the web!) have the same name.

As such, Google can have trouble figuring out if this is Jane Smith, a talented airline pilot, or Jane Smith, an MD with over 40 years of experience with brain surgery. Additionally, Google tries to determine if the author has written articles, books, or research papers on other platforms. What is her educational background, and has she won awards?

Google attempts to answer those questions (and many more!) by looking across the web and understanding more about the entity, “Jane Smith”.

This is where the Person schema comes into play. By properly adding structured data to your author page or bio, you can help Google better understand the person’s background relevant to the content created. Perhaps even more importantly, you can also use this schema to provide links to other resources that Google can use to validate this individual’s expertise.

Feel free to learn more about entities and their impact on the web.

How Our Google Structured Data Component Simplifies Creating Person Schema

Generating accurate and well-formatted structured data for a Person can take significant time. This schema can be manually created, but it is both time-consuming and error-prone. Additionally, most standalone person schema generators on the market only feature a basic list of attributes, which does the bare minimum of what search engines need to better understand the entity at hand.

In version 5.3 of Google Structured Data Pro, we added the ability to create a Person schema with over 30 attributes quickly. That schema can easily be added to your bio/author page for the person of interest, helping Google better understand the individual’s authority and expertise.

We hope you enjoy this latest addition to our powerful, structured data component and that it saves you tons of time!

We also want to thank Ben Seidel at Igniting Business for his help and collaboration in fast-tracking the integration of robust Person schema abilities in our Google Structured Data extension.