No author meta tag

This issue checks whether article, blog, and editorial pages have a properly configured <meta name="author"> tag that declares the human author of the page's content.

A passing implementation includes:

• A <meta name="author"> tag in the <head> section of article/blog pages
• A meaningful author name — not a template default like admin, author or your name. A corporate byline such as "The Editorial Team" counts as meaningful

Pages that are not articles are not checked at all. <meta name="author"> is not an indexing or ranking signal on any page, so demanding it on a pricing page or a product listing reports markup that cannot affect search performance.

Example of correct implementation:

<meta name="author" content="Jane Smith" />

This tag supports Google's E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals, particularly for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) pages like health, finance, or legal content.

The author meta tag contributes to content quality signals and SEO:

• Rankings: Google's E-E-A-T guidelines emphasize credible authorship, especially for YMYL content. Clear authorship signals can positively influence rankings.
• User experience: Users trust content more when they know who authored it, especially for expert advice or opinion pieces.
• AI Search / AEO: AI-powered search systems may use authorship signals to assess content credibility and attribute information correctly.
• Content credibility: Consistent authorship across meta tags, visible bylines, and schema markup demonstrates professionalism and attention to detail.

Resolving this issue improves your SEO health score by strengthening E-E-A-T signals, which is particularly important for content that could impact a user's health, finances, or safety.

Follow these steps to implement the author meta tag correctly:

1. Add the meta author tag to article pages: Place the following line inside the <head> section of your HTML document on all article, blog, and editorial pages:

   <meta name="author" content="Author Name" />

2. Use a real author name: Avoid placeholder values like:

   • admin
   • webmaster
   • author
   • test
   • user
   • wordpress

3. Ensure consistency: Make sure the author name in the meta tag matches:

   • The visible byline on the page
   • The author name in schema.org structured data (JSON-LD)
   • The author name in any author profile links

4. Mark up with schema.org: For even stronger E-E-A-T signals, also include author information in JSON-LD structured data:

   <script type="application/ld+json">
     {
       "@context": "https://schema.org",
       "@type": "Article",
       "author": {
         "@type": "Person",
         "name": "Jane Smith"
       }
     }
   </script>

5. Verify implementation:

   • Use View Page Source to confirm the tag appears correctly
   • Check that the author name is consistent across all page elements
   • For YMYL pages, ensure the author is a qualified expert

Note: This tag is most important on article, blog, and editorial pages. It's not necessary on product pages, contact pages, or other non-editorial content.

Example 1: Correct Implementation

Scenario: A properly configured article page with author meta tag.

Correct State (Passes):

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
  <meta name="author" content="Jane Smith" />
  <title>Article Title</title>
</head>
<body>
  <article>
    <h1>Article Title</h1>
    <p class="byline">By Jane Smith</p>
    <p>Article content...</p>
  </article>
</body>

Example 2: Missing Author Meta Tag on Article Page

Scenario: Article page has no author meta tag.

Problematic State (Fails):

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
  <title>Article Title</title>
</head>
<body>
  <article>
    <h1>Article Title</h1>
    <p class="byline">By John Doe</p>
    <p>Article content...</p>
  </article>
</body>

Why it fails: Article pages should have an author meta tag to support E-E-A-T signals.

Corrected State (Passes):

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
  <meta name="author" content="John Doe" />
  <title>Article Title</title>
</head>
<body>
  <article>
    <h1>Article Title</h1>
    <p class="byline">By John Doe</p>
    <p>Article content...</p>
  </article>
</body>

Example 3: Placeholder Author Name

Scenario: Author meta tag uses a placeholder value.

Problematic State (Fails):

<head>
  <meta name="author" content="admin" />
  <title>Article Title</title>
</head>
<body>
  <article>
    <h1>Article Title</h1>
    <p class="byline">By Sarah Johnson</p>
    <p>Article content...</p>
  </article>
</body>

Why it fails: "admin" is a placeholder value, not a real author name. This undermines E-E-A-T signals.

Corrected State (Passes):

<head>
  <meta name="author" content="Sarah Johnson" />
  <title>Article Title</title>
</head>
<body>
  <article>
    <h1>Article Title</h1>
    <p class="byline">By Sarah Johnson</p>
    <p>Article content...</p>
  </article>
</body>

Example 4: Inconsistent Author Information

Scenario: Author meta tag doesn't match visible byline or schema markup.

Problematic State (Fails):

<head>
  <meta name="author" content="J. Smith" />
  <script type="application/ld+json">
    {
      "@type": "Article",
      "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Jane Smith" }
    }
  </script>
  <title>Article Title</title>
</head>
<body>
  <article>
    <h1>Article Title</h1>
    <p class="byline">By Jane Smith</p>
    <p>Article content...</p>
  </article>
</body>

Why it fails: Inconsistent author names across meta tag ("J. Smith"), schema ("Jane Smith"), and byline ("Jane Smith") create conflicting signals.

Corrected State (Passes):

<head>
  <meta name="author" content="Jane Smith" />
  <script type="application/ld+json">
    {
      "@type": "Article",
      "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Jane Smith" }
    }
  </script>
  <title>Article Title</title>
</head>
<body>
  <article>
    <h1>Article Title</h1>
    <p class="byline">By Jane Smith</p>
    <p>Article content...</p>
  </article>
</body>

This check runs on article pages only, and the scope is the check.

<meta name="author"> is not used by any search engine for indexing or ranking — Google has said so explicitly — so its absence on an ordinary page is not an SEO defect. An earlier version demanded it everywhere and produced a finding on every page of every site scanned, over markup that cannot affect search performance.

What survives that objection is narrower and real. On an article, the author is a byline: the thing a reader looks for and the thing E-E-A-T is assessed from. An article that names nobody is missing something.

1. Is this page an article?

Any one of these is enough, because real sites express it in exactly one of them and rarely in more:

• <meta property="og:type" content="article"> — the page's own declaration
• schema.org Article, BlogPosting, NewsArticle, TechArticle (and the other Article subtypes) in a JSON-LD block, including inside an @graph
• an <article> element that carries an <h1> or <h2>. The heading requirement is what keeps a card grid of <article> teasers on a listing page from being read as the article it links to
• a URL under an article section — /blog/, /news/, /articles/, /posts/, /stories/, /insights/, /press-releases/ — that goes deeper than the section index. /blog/how-we-did-it is an article; /blog is the index and is not, and /blogger-outreach/pricing is neither, because whole path segments are matched rather than substrings

A page that is none of these is never reported, whatever it declares.

2. Does the article name an author?

The name attribute is matched case-insensitively, so name="Author" and name="AUTHOR" are read as well as name="author".

Three states are reported:

• No tag — the article states no author at all
• An empty tag — content="", or a <meta name="author"> with no content attribute. The field is occupied and names nobody
• A placeholder — admin, author, user, unknown, your name, wordpress and similar template defaults. Matched against the whole trimmed value, never as a substring, so "Admin Aziz" is a person and is not reported

Any real value passes, including a corporate byline. "The Editorial Team" is a legitimate editorial decision and a real answer to "who wrote this".

The author value is recorded in the page report on every page, article or not, so the page report can show it even where nothing is reported.

Storage Level

Page Level — This issue is evaluated for each individual URL.

Database Table / Prisma Model

PageHtmlHeadAudit

Stored Fields

Detection Dependencies

• The following data sources are required to evaluate this issue:
• HTML Document — The crawler parses the HTML head section to find the author meta tag
• Meta Tag Extraction — The <meta name="author"> tag is extracted