Hello Rajesh, and welcome to the forums.

It's an interesting question and I haven't seen anything definite from Google about it. Here are my thoughts about it.

An author profile page requires a headshot photo and a brand does not have a "head" to photograph. Even in the Google News area where reporters can have authorship mark-up, the profile page is their personal page and not the brand page for their news business. The idea seems to be "who wrote this" rather than "who owns this".

So my guess right now (and it is a guess) is that Google does not intend authorship mark-up to use a brand page but only a personal profile.

Can't you use the personal profile for author markup and brand profile for publishing markup? That's how I've been setting it up.

@nutmeg, this is what I do as well.

But I'm not clear about whether rel=author and rel=publisher can be on the same page at the same time. Last time I check, the snippets tool was showing an error. So for now I'm doing rel=publisher for the homepage only. article pages have rel=author. What do you do?

klark0 wrote:
But I'm not clear about whether rel=author and rel=publisher can be on the same page at the same time. Last time I check, the snippets tool was showing an error.

That's apparently a bug on Google's end: [google.com...]

--
Ryan

Thanks rlange for the link to the Google support thread....

Using rel=publisher and rel=author at the same time for a webpage?
[google.com...]

Google's John Mueller (JohnMu) has several posts on that thread, and yes, when he first posted on 11/27/11, there was a bug in Rich Snippets testing tool, which flagged the use of both together as an error. He reports that this apparently has been fixed.

Here are relevant comments from two of his posts...

...it's fine to have both a link rel=publisher and author-markup on the same page. The rel=publisher confirms that your website is the publisher of that Google+ Page; the authorship markup confirms that you (your personal profile) is the author of the content on that page. This markup can be used independently, since the meanings are slightly different....

As far as I can tell, the tool has been updated to accept pages with both rel=publisher and rel=author, it just shows a warning when you have both of them on the same page in case you're not doing that on purpose.

At the moment, only a "person" (eg Google Profile) can be an author, so from the sounds of it, you have that set up properly.

Tedster Thanks for your support.

Yes, As you mentioned markup authorship for Personal google+ profile is the right option. So will going markup in that same way..

I just went through this and according to google if you have a website the proper way to do mark up is to have the publisher markup on the main page and all other pages is to have the author mark up. They say not to put both on the same page.

snickles, did you read the quote that Robert_Charlton posted just above? You have some conflicting information here - do you have a link for where you read it?

If you use the rich snippets testing tool at [google.com...]

You will get the below error message if you have both a publisher tag and author tag on the same page.


"Warning: Both rel="publisher" and rel="author" are present on the page. You should put rel="author" on content pages and rel="publisher" on your home page only (unless this is the home page of a single author site)."

Right, and as rlange points out with a link to a statement by John Mu, that's a bug.

[google.com...]

Believe me, I tore my hair out for an hour before I found that.

As I noted above, JohnMu posted twice in that support thread. In the first post, of 11/27/11, he mentions it was a bug.

I also quoted what he said in his post of 12/21/11 on the same thread, and I'll quote it again, this time with some emphasis added...

As far as I can tell, the tool has been updated to accept pages with both rel=publisher and rel=author, it just shows a warning when you have both of them on the same page in case you're not doing that on purpose.

At the moment, only a "person" (eg Google Profile) can be an author, so from the sounds of it, you have that set up properly.

snickles characterizes that as an "error message". JohnMu says: "As far as I can tell..." it's "a warning" message." netmeg was tearing her hair, but I'm not sure when. ;)

I haven't tried the markup, so I can't say. Is it a warning message or an error message?

It was a warning message. Sorry for the confusion. So Robert's post was the correct one in the first place after reading it more thoroughly with the included link and the warning message I seen when using the tool should probably just be ignored.

Google should just get rid of that warning message. I cant be the only one that got confused. Now a days anything google gives you a warning about you have to take seriously. I don't like those messages when it comes to my specific site.