Hi,
Google webmasters tool tells me that all of my posts contain “Missing: author” error. I am assuming this is theme related. What could be the problem? I did not change or modify the theme in any way since installing it. All I did was disable the author box below posts from the theme settings – but I don’t think this is the reason I get erros, correct?
Picture: http://i.imgur.com/gXlYYyW.jpg
Any suggestions on how to fix this or what is causing this?
Make sure your posts actually have author name assigned to them vs the admin account; most common issue.
They do have author name assigned to them. My author name is the nickname I chose for my admin username. Could my nickname be causing this?
Best bet is to check your page source, meta data to see if there is actually an author tag there listing the author name.
if not, try using a plugin like Yoast WordPress SEO or similar which is what I use to put all that stuff in there properly (and it sticks across themes, which is totally awesome).
Chris,
Is such a mistake a huge and essential issue in terms in eyes of google?
Well… two things:
1) Google killed their author ranking/verified author setup this Summer. That was one thing, no longer matters.
2) Having author data for an “article” is important as it identifies it is, in fact, an article and not a press release, “about us” page or advertising content. This doesn’t appear in SERPS anymore, but can help Google tie things together, and should be included if bothering with micro data.
However the error might also occur with the author field being empty in a sitemap, or having an empty meta field like
<meta name="author" content="">
vs
<meta name="author" content="Christopher Simmons">
Obviously having the first iteration above would be a bad idea in general.
Thanks Chris,
I know that google provides this info on their pages, but maybe you have in your mind kind of tutorials and practical courses of web-site development with professional web-masters. Sorry for off-top.
Vladimir
This is all a bit off topic to the thread for the person having an issue, but I used to write a monthly column for Digital Imaging magazine back in the day on web development, and my articles were also published by the Graphic Artists Guild in their newspaper; however all those articles are now terribly out of date since they pre-dated CSS3, responsive design, WordPress, Boostrap, mod_pagespeed, mod_spdy, etc.
I have in mind relaunching a site to post all my whacky fonts of wisdom or nonsense on the topic of webdev, but frankly I’m just too busy right now actually redoing my main business sites which pay the bills, then fooling around with some other things as kind of a hobby (e.g., ga-ga.com), etc.
Lots of great sites with tutorials and such. And for SEO, Google has their own free document download which tells you what you should have for your website. PageSpeed is important, original content most important, https will be important in coming years but not critical just yet; luckily with WordPress there are dozens of good sites out there with basic tutorials on the “simple stuff” and also the official WP docs are good to read, and it seems many folks buying themes on ThemeForest don’t bother to do that (“how do I set permalinks…” ?) …
Anyway……. I ended up in TagDiv land a year ago as we were building our own WP theme again, and I just decided I didn’t want to deal with that. Trouble was finding folks who even knew what PageSpeed was (!), so Radu and Co. caught my eye, and I like their philosophy of what they’re doing, so we decided to try their themes. So far so good.
But I need to get back to work! 🙂
Hey Chris,
it appears that my posts have the author meta tag, so I don’t think that is what is causing the errors:
page source from a random post: http://i.imgur.com/RSxqlTb.jpg
I already use the SEO by Yoast plugin, but I’m not really sure what I should do with the settings regarding my author problem.
Maybe I should create a new username and assign all the posts written so far to the new author. Do you think that might fix the problem?
Well, it might have been a temporary problem with your sitemap, too.
One thing you can do is select all and mark “fixed” in your webmaster tools account, and then see if the issue reappears.
Chris, from the text above I can conclude, that you badly need to find some time for ‘blogging’ cause I can see how much you have to say and share.
Thank you for your work and support.
Sincerely,
Vladimir
Hi,
@Christopher – Thanks!
@Novaque – The Author Box contains the Author hCard data, you disable it and that’s why you get those errors. The issue is on the list, we’ll fix it in one of the next updates.
Thank you, Emil G.
Hi, i’m gettin same errors too. when are you going to fix this problem? errors are keeps raising everyday. author:missing its everywhere!
Not an error for any of my sites using the theme.
What is there to fix?
You need to actually have an author assigned to post, AND you need to have the author meta data appearing in your posts.
This is covered in the thread you’re posting in.
Did you check your page source? Do you have an author assigned to the post instead of “admin” ? Is the author tag in the meta data when you view source?
if you don’t know what any of that means you might need to read up on how web pages work.
