Want to have your company logo appear in Google search results similar to how authors get to have their pictures displayed? Google’s now announced support for that through “organization markup.” But it’s not quite the “publishership” that some have been expecting.
Google explains its post today that Schema.org organization markup can be used to do this to have a preferred logo appear in its results, saying:
A business whose homepage is www.example.com can add the following markup using visible on-page elements on their homepage:<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"> <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com/">Home</a> <img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" /> </div>This example indicates to Google that this image is designated as the organization’s logo image for the homepage also included in the markup, and, where possible, may be used in Google search results.
Google has another method many have expected to be used, the rel=publisher attribute. But earlier this month, Google downplayed the idea this would happen:
If rel=publisher had been used, that would have opened things up for Google to better understand “publishership” for sites, similar to how it supports authorship for individuals using the rel=author attribute. Maybe that will still come, but for now, it doesn’t appear to have arrived.
It’s also unclear what wins if a page has both a company logo indicated and has an author image associated with it. We’re checking for more with Google.