Article and Author Entity Markup

What Google recommends

Google's Article documentation says "There are no required properties; instead, add the properties that apply to your content." The recommended set is short: author, author.name, author.url, dateModified, datePublished, headline and image. The Article type also has subtypes such as NewsArticle, BlogPosting and TechArticle; choose the one that fits, or plain Article when unsure.

Google's author best practices

Google's Article documentation lists five author best practices. Three matter most here, quoted because the wording matters, followed by its definition of author.url:

• "Make sure that all the authors that are presented as authors on the web page are also included in markup."
• "In the author.name property, only specify the name of the author."
• "Use the Person type for people, and the Organization type for organizations."
• The author.url property is defined as "A link to a web page that uniquely identifies the author of the article."

The second rule catches many sites: "Sam Ortega | Reviews editor" or "By Sam Ortega" in author.name breaks it. Put the job title in jobTitle on the Person node instead.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Licensed online casinos in New Jersey: what to check",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Sam Ortega",
    "url": "https://ledgerlane.example/team/sam-ortega/"
  },
  "datePublished": "2026-08-20T10:00:00-04:00",
  "dateModified": "2026-10-12T09:15:00-04:00",
  "image": "https://ledgerlane.example/media/nj-guide.png",
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "@id": "https://ledgerlane.example/#org",
    "name": "Ledger Lane Reviews"
  }
}

People, desks and organizations

Many gambling publishers credit content to an editorial team rather than a person. That is fine when it is true. Mark the author up as an Organization, with a url that describes the team, as Google's guidance on Person and Organization types requires. Do not turn a team byline into an invented person. Invented authors, borrowed photos and made-up credentials are fake content, and they undermine every trust signal a gambling site has.

SchemaReel itself credits pages to the SchemaReel Editorial Desk, marked up as an Organization, until named authors are added.

Author pages

An author page gives author.url something to point at. Google's ProfilePage documentation describes markup for such pages: a mainEntity that is a Person or Organization, with a name, and recommended properties such as sameAs, image and identifier. Google asks for real images, not placeholders. The Person reference has an example.

Dates

Use ISO 8601 with a time zone offset. Google recommends time zone information and otherwise uses Googlebot's time zone. datePublished is the first publication; dateModified is the last substantial change. Both should match the dates readers see. Changing dateModified without changing the content is a mismatch that readers notice even when systems do not.

Publisher

Point publisher at your Organization node by @id. On sites with several brands, check that each brand's articles name the right publisher: a shared template that names the wrong brand is one of the most common identity errors in an entity audit.

Sources

How SchemaReel chooses, reads and dates its sources is set out on the data sources page.

1. Google Search Central, Article structured data, last updated September 8, 2026.
2. Google Search Central, ProfilePage structured data, last updated September 8, 2026.