Adding author entity schema (not just a byline) lifted YMYL rankings — one health site's 5-week experiment

Adding author entity schema (not just a byline) lifted YMYL rankings — one health site's 5-week experiment
A health publisher in a competitive YMYL niche had bylines as plain text. They built proper Person schema for 30 authors — knowsAbout, sameAs to credentials and profiles, jobTitle — and linked it into each Article via the author node.
— Average position improved 1.8 spots across 600 author-attributed articles
— Top-author pages gained the most, suggesting entity trust transfer
What it means for you: in YMYL, a byline is a string; an author entity with sameAs to verifiable credentials is a trust signal Google can resolve. Structured authorship is doing measurable work. Watch this: author entities are increasingly how AI systems decide whom to cite on health and finance.