Lots of agents, brokers and real estate web masters are implementing Google authorship markup on their websites and blogs. It’s a great way to get increased visibility in the SERPs, improve CTR, boost your personal branding and claim your original content as your own. However, too many agents I see are implementing authorship incorrectly, which can get them in a heap of trouble. How so?

Many site owners are simply inserting the rel=”author” tag site-wide. For single-author websites/blogs this might seem to make sense, since you might be the author of everything on that site. The problem is when you have indexable IDX. You are not the “author” of all of those listings. If you have rel=”author” on your IDX listing pages you’re effectively claiming, to Google and the world, that all of the listings in your local MLS are yours.

This is not only contrary to Google’s guidelines, but the compliance department at your MLS might have something to say about it, too. Not to mention the actual listing agents/brokers, who, when Googling their own listing, will find your site in the SERPs with your pic next it, and the text “by [your name]” next to it. That sure looks like you’re claiming that their listing is yours, and I don’t think they’ll be too happy about that.

Are you the original “author” of that listing?

While some site owners may be doing this intentionally, I think most are doing it without even knowing it. Here’s how it can happen. You have a WordPress site, and you have a plugin that supports Google Authorship, like WordPress SEO by Yoast. You throw your Google+ URL into your user profile, and presto, Google Authorship is set for every page or post which you create. But guess what, your indexable IDX plugin sets the “author” for each listing to the default admin user in WordPress. If you’re using the blog’s default user login, you’re now inserting rel=”author” and your personal Google+ URL into every listing page, effectively claiming them as your original content.

So how can you tell if yours is setup correctly? Go to any IDX listing detail page on your site and copy that URL. Now go to Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Paste your URL into the field and click “Preview.” If you see your author info shown in an IDX listing page, you don’t have it setup correctly.

How do you fix it? Well, I can only tell you how I fixed it on my site, IntownElite.com, which is on a WordPress platform with dsIDXpress. I created a new user login which will be used for our original content. Remove the Google+ URL from the default admin login, and add it to the new user login. Now you’ll want to go to all of the posts and pages that you created and change the author from the default user to the new user profile. Now your rel=”author” tag will be associated with all the content that you really did author, and not associated with the IDX listings. You can test again by using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool, or you can view the source of any IDX listing page and make sure the rel=”author” is not there.

Now, here’s a twist. Recently my MLS compliance department contacted me saying that another agent complained that I was claiming authorship of their listing on Google. Fortunately I have authorship setup correctly on my site, so I was able to quickly demonstrate via the Google Structured Data Testing Tool that I was not intentionally claiming authorship. But surprisingly, even though I did not have rel=”author” on that listing page, Google was showing my wife as author of that page in the SERPs! How could that be? Well Google sometimes attributes authorship by other methods if it thinks you are the author. One of which is an author by-line. But wait, I don’t have a “by-line” on my listing pages, what gives? Well it turns out that all dsIDXpress listing pages have this line in the contact form, to comply with “Do not call list” regulations:

By submitting this form with your telephone number you are consenting for [agent name] to contact you even if your name is on a Federal or State “Do not call List.”

It’s obvious to any human that this statement is not an author by-line. But apparently to a Google bot, it sees the word “By” followed by the name of an author in the same sentence and thinks, “hey, authorship!” So even though I wasn’t claiming authorship it was showing that way in the SERPs. My MLS compliance folks don’t care how it’s happening, they just want it to stop. So I simply had to remove the agent’s name form that line and replace it with something else, like the company name or even just the words “an agent.”

So, this is an important lesson for anyone who’s using both Google authorship markup and indexable IDX. Even if your MLS board doesn’t nail you on this, most likely Google eventually will. Over timeGoogle will grow suspicious of you claiming to be the author of 20,000 MLS listings, especially when the same content is on hundreds of other sites. I can also tell you that this issue is in no way limited to WordPress or Diverse Solutions IDX. I’ve seen the same incorrect author attribution on sites with several different IDX providers, including REW, iHomeFinder and others. Basically, this is not the fault of your IDX provider, it’s something that you as the site owner need to get right.