Authors and Author Pages

Authors let you credit the people who write your content. Each author gets a public profile page listing their articles, with structured data that helps search engines connect the content to a real person.

The Authors page

Click Authors in the left navigation. The page lists every user in your HelpGuides account. Each author is linked to one of these users.

Column	Shows
User	The user's name in HelpGuides
Author Name	The name shown publicly, if the user is set up as an author
Author URL	The author's website, if set
Status	Author if the user is set up as an author for this project, otherwise Not configured

Authors are set up per project, so the same person can have a different profile in each project.

Add an author

On the Authors page, find the user and click Add as Author. If the person isn't listed, invite them to your account first.
In Add Author, check the Author Name (it starts as the user's name) and fill in any other fields.
Click Save.

Field	Used for
Author Name	The name shown on articles and on the author page. It also sets the author page URL
Author URL	A link to the author's own site or profile, shown as Website on the author page
Author Photo	A headshot shown on the author page
Bio	A short biography shown on the author page and used as its meta description
Email	Shown as an Email link on the author page
LinkedIn URL, Facebook URL, Twitter URL	Shown as social icons on the author page

All fields except Author Name are optional, and anything you leave blank is left off the author page. The email address is public, so only add one you're happy for readers to see.

To change an author later, click Edit on their row, make your changes and click Save. To stop crediting someone, click Edit, then Remove Author and confirm. The user keeps their HelpGuides access.

Assign an author to an article

Open the article in the editor and click Advanced.
On the SEO tab, choose the author from Author. Only users set up as authors appear in the list.
Click Save Options.

SEO tab with the Author dropdown — Choosing an article author

To remove the credit, choose No author selected.

On blog posts, the author appears under the title as Written by: with a link to their author page, and in the post's BlogPosting structured data. See Blog Projects.

The public author page

Every author has a page on your site at /author/ followed by their name in lowercase with spaces replaced by hyphens. For example:

https://docs.example.com/author/jane-smith

The page shows the author's photo, name, bio and links, followed by Articles by and a grid of their published articles, newest first.

Renaming an author changes their URL

Because the URL comes from the Author Name, changing the name changes the page address and the old address shows the 404 page. Add a redirect from the old address if it's been shared. See Redirects and Page Not Found Reports.

Structured data

The author page includes ProfilePage structured data describing the author as a Person, with their name and, when set, their URL, photo and bio. Search engines use this to associate the author with their work. For example:

{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "ProfilePage", "mainEntity": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Jane Smith", "url": "https://janesmith.example.com", "image": "https://cdn.example.com/jane.png", "description": "Jane writes about email deliverability." } }