Entity and trust · Branch E.A, Authorship and expertise
E-02 Bylines and author profiles must show real responsibility and experience
Where a reader would naturally ask 'who prepared this?', content must carry a real byline, role, scope and a verifiable profile.
- Scope
- All public content
- Priority
- High priority.
- Quality bucket
- Entity and trust
- Legacy coverage
- SEO-12, SEO-13
Why it matters
When an article or review has no clear author, or one called 'admin', readers cannot tell who stands behind the advice or whether they have relevant experience. Google's guidance on people-first content encourages making it clear who created the content. A real byline with a checkable profile gives users and search systems something concrete to trust.
How to implement
- Add an author field to article and review templates.
- Replace names like 'admin' with a real person, or with the organisation where that is more honest.
- Write the author's real role and experience in a visible bio.
- List related publications and projects.
- Align any ProfilePage and Person markup with the bio shown on the page.
- Report byline coverage by content type and check each bio's claims.
Checklist
- Add an author field to article and review templates.
- Where a person is not needed in corporate content, use organisation authorship.
- Remove meaningless author names such as 'admin'.
- State the real role and experience.
- Show related publications and projects.
- If ProfilePage plus Person is used, match it to the real information visible on the page.
How to audit
- Produce a byline coverage report by content type.
- Verify the credential and role claims in each bio.
How UltimateSEO checks this automatically
Partly automated. The crawler detects bylines on article pages and links to author profiles; whether the named person is real and responsible is confirmed by the business. The crawl gives a signal; a person decides the final state with business evidence.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Sources
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.1, revised 2026-10-07. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.