Missing author meta tag?

Hello @queso

Thank you for contacting the support and sorry for the issue you are facing.

Can you share the URL of the page where you are getting that error?

We checked on one of our test sites here:
https://rankmath.wpgrammy.com/template-sticky/

and the LinkedIn Post Inspector correctly identifies the author as Amanda Barden
https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect/https:%2F%2Frankmath.wpgrammy.com%2Ftemplate-sticky%2F

Looking forward to helping you.

That’s interesting. If you look in the source on that page the meta tag isn’t there either…

I see the difference though…

While your test site doesn’t have the meta tag either… it does have
<span class=”screen-reader-text”>Posted by</span><span class=”author vcard”>Amanda Barden</span></span>

Per recommendations being a single author blog, I disabled the author archive. I’m guessing that the vcard class isn’t what’s triggering it and I also have the word Author in the class tag around my name on the post so it has to be using the actual author archive link tag to trigger. (my theme has the surrounding class as “post-author” so I assume if your test page was pulling from class it would have found mine too.

Also if you look on the post-inspector and click on her name (on the left) you’ll see no backup authors were considered. So it seems like it still really wants the meta tag and the archive page is just a backup. Since a user’s theme could also break that archive link, it seems like the safest route is to just always use that meta tag so LinkedIn doesn’t have to rely on a backup method.

And at minimum the tag should be inserted for users who disable the author archive.

I’m fortunate enough to be comfortable editing the .php but have you also considered just a few generic boxes in the settings that would allow the user to set any meta tag? (I think LinkedIn is a big enough site it would deserve a formal fix, but it may prevent some headaches for you in the future.

Hello @queso

Thank you for your response. Appreciate it.

Sorry for our ignorance but do you know any other SEO plugin adding that tag? We could see if we can add this to our plugin since we are already adding the Author property in the Schema Markup and do not want both of them to conflict with each other.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Sorry I sure don’t. First time sharing anything on LinkedIn… Spoke too soon… looks like SEOPress does:
https://www.seopress.org/blog/author-meta-for-linkedin-seopress-3-7-4-release

Of interest, the API documentation says they want an ID to share the post not a free-text name… not sure if it’s because the API already requires authorization so they have your name off of that or not… But when I tried to share I was logged in as me so it clearly wasn’t utilizing it.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/linkedin/consumer/integrations/self-serve/share-on-linkedin?context=linkedin/consumer/context

Found a brief discussion on the Yoast support site about it which could be true regarding it conflicting with Pinterest. But I’d still keep the tag as I will never have a Pinterest account but am on LinkedIn a lot.

Hello @queso

Thank you for your research and a detailed message.

Sorry to disappoint but that feature is not available in the Rank Math plugin at this time.

With that being said, there are existing feature requests, so I’ve added your vote to our internal suggestions lists. If your suggestions are something that we’re able to introduce, we’ll be sure to let you know.

We are closing this topic for now and will let you know when we will introduce this feature in the plugin.

In the meantime, if you need any other assistance, please let us know. We are here to help.

Good day.