Google announced three days ago that it was introducing another markup attribute that webmasters could use on their websites. The attribute is obviously geared toward news sites that use multiple authors for writing page content. But any website with multiple authors or content creators can use the link attribute.
The attribute of which I am speaking is the real=”author” attribute. It’s to be used on links on the same domain, not on links that point from one domain to another.
For instance, if you have a website where videos are posted by several regular contributors and you want each of those contributors to have a bio page, then you would link from each video content page on the site to the creator’s bio page using the rel=”author” link attribute. It would look something like this:
- < a href="http://www.samplewebpage.com/videoproducers/mickeyspillane" rel="author" >Mickey Spillane< /a >
In this example, Mickey Spillane is the video’s producer. Because he has produced more than one video for the sample website, he would have several links pointing from his author bio page to his videos. In turn, each video would point back to his producer bio page with the rel=”author” attribute.
This is a rather nifty link attribute I think. If searchers are looking for a particular video content producer, then the link attribute would likely be used to help them find that producer.