Will changing Post/Page Author Affect Ranking or SEO?

  • Quick question I haven’t found answered (perhaps because it is a silly question…):

    If I have 500 posts on a well established site, and I change the author from user1 to user2…will this have any negative impact on site ranking or any other type of score/rank which could have a negative impact?

    The reason for doing this would be to create a user with a login other than the default “admin”, and delete the “admin” user…for security reasons.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • I’m no SEO expert but I would think Google looks at your page/posts h1 tag and it’s content, not the author specifically. As long as you’re not relying on author pages as landing pages or the focus of your SEO efforts.

    It might make a difference if you have google authorship set up for the existing author account but in general I don’t believe it will have much of an effect.

    Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    You don’t need to make this change on the front-end of your website. The security measure to change your username from “admin” is to prevent the most common attacks that occur from robots and not humans: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Hardening_WordPress#Security_through_obscurity

    Thread Starter acann

    (@acann)

    Thanks, yes that is what I plan to do it’s just that the user actively used is not the user that has all the posts under it (due to a process the user had been doing for quite a while). So for ease of the user I was going to adjust the user they currently use (which has a good user_login) by making their user_nicename something different (hence not exposing their user_login in page source), then move all the posts/pages over to their user, and delete the old user with an easy to guess user_login.

    I just wanted to be sure moving the posts to a different author would not affect SEO/page rank/google authorship, etc. I can’t find much online about that.

    So is it safe to say it really shouldn’t impact anything?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Will changing Post/Page Author Affect Ranking or SEO?’ is closed to new replies.