Google recommends adding an author’s URL to article schema to help with disambiguating the correct author when multiple writers have the same or similar names.
This is confirmed in an official Google changelog, which reads:
“August 6: Added a new recommended author.url property to the Article structured data documentation. The url property helps Google disambiguate the correct author of the article.”
To be clear, the author URL property is not new. What’s new is the recommendation to use it to help Google disambiguate the correct author of an article.
The author URL property is nested within Article schema, so if you’re already using that markup on your site it’s just one more field to add.
Google notes that the sameAs property can be used as an alternative to the author URL, as Google can understand both sameAs and URL when disambiguating authors.
Previous to this update, there was no such solution for assisting Google with disambiguating authors. Google’s John Mueller once spoke of a process called reconciliation, in which the search engine looks for URLs in author bio pages to differentiate writers with similar names.
This new method of using author URL schema markup sounds like it could be more effective.
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