Building Author Authority for a Preserved Website

How do you establish E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for a website that's no longer actively publishing? Google's quality guidelines are designed for living sites with active authors. But a preserved archive has something most websites don't: two decades of consistent, high-quality content from identifiable authors with verifiable credentials.

The challenge is making that visible to search engines.

The author identity chain

Google's author understanding works through a chain of signals:

1. Article page → links to author page via author Person object with URL
2. Author page → has Person JSON-LD with sameAs links to external profiles
3. External profiles (LinkedIn, GitHub, etc.) → confirm the person exists and matches

Each link in the chain strengthens the signal. A broken link — an author URL that 404s, a missing sameAs, an inconsistent name — weakens it.

What we found

All About Symbian had no author pages. The articles linked to /authors/rafe-blandford.php but that path returned 404. Every article by every author had a broken identity chain. Nearly 5,000 articles by me, 12,000 by Steve Litchfield, 4,200 by Ewan Spence — all orphaned.

All About Windows Phone was slightly better — it had four spidered author pages, but they contained old email addresses, dead Google+ links, and no structured data.

Building the pages

We created proper author pages with:

• Person JSON-LD with name, jobTitle, description, image, sameAs, worksFor, knowsAbout, and alumniOf
• Cross-site linking — each author's AAS page links to their AAWP page via sameAs, and vice versa
• Professional headshots — replaced the 150×100 greyscale thumbnails with proper photos
• Published work tables — article counts per site with section breakdowns
• Selected articles — editorially chosen pieces that demonstrate range and authority
• Bio text — establishing credentials, career progression, and specific areas of expertise

The sameAs array is where the identity chain connects to the wider web. My author page links to LinkedIn, GitHub, Instagram, rafeblandford.com, the 361 Podcast, and the archive portal. Google can follow these links, verify the identity, and associate the 5,000 articles with a verified person.

The publisher entity

Author identity alone isn't enough. The publisher — All About Symbian as an organisation — also needs to be a verifiable entity. The homepage WebSite schema includes:

• Organisation with name, url, foundingDate (2001), logo
• sameAs linking to the GitHub repo and social profiles
• founder as a Person object linking back to the author page
• memberOf connecting all three All About sites
• knowsAbout covering the site's topic areas

This creates a bidirectional relationship: the Organisation knows about the Person (founder), and the Person works for the Organisation. Google can trace both directions.

The URL consistency problem

There was a subtle issue: all 13,496 article pages linked to author URLs with www.allaboutsymbian.com, but the canonical domain (and the author pages) used allaboutsymbian.com without www. The www version redirects via 301, but every article's author link was going through an unnecessary redirect before reaching the author page.

A single sed pass across the article files fixed the URLs, eliminating the redirect hop and giving Google a direct link from article → author page.

Minor authors

Not every contributor needs a full profile. The top five authors (Rafe, Steve, Ewan, David, Krisse) each have dedicated pages. Twenty-two minor contributors — people who wrote between 1 and 29 articles — redirect to a contributors page that lists them all with article counts.

This means every author URL in every article resolves to something meaningful. No 404s. No broken chains.

Results

The author pages are now the strongest E-E-A-T signal on the archive:

• 7 author pages on AAS with Person JSON-LD
• 4 enhanced author pages on AAWP
• Cross-site sameAs linking creating a unified identity across properties
• Every article linking to a live, structured author page
• The publisher Organisation connected to the founder via founder and worksFor

For a site that stopped publishing years ago, this is arguably stronger author identity than most active blogs. The content is fixed, but the identity signals keep strengthening.