Structured data use for author on a medical website

Question

We're setting up an informational website, with

1. informative articles about medical procedures
2. pages with info about specific medical clinics
3. pages about specific doctors
4. blog style articles
5. category pages with an overview of procedures, clinics or doctors.

We are currently developing the structured data profiles per page type and are having trouble deciding whether the homepage, contact page, category pages, individual clinic pages and doctor pages should have an author or only organization tag (for medical procedure pages and blog articles we already decided we do want to include an author). Our contact page will get the look and feel of an article with additional information, so it's not a standard WordPress contact page.

What would you advise; include or exclude an author for the various types of pages? What do you base your advice on?

Answer 1

Answer from Google's point of view. Their General structured data guidelines -> Relevance tells us:

Your structured data must be a true representation of the page content.

Therefore, it makes sense to use the author property only for the main content that lists the author.

I want to expand my answer a little and go beyond your question.

Any medical content can significantly impact the life and health of users. Google classifies such content as Your Money Or Your Life (YMYL) and has strict requirements for content reliability such as Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (EAT), which among other things has requirements for medical content:

● High E-A-T medical advice should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation. High E-A-T medical advice or information should be written or produced in a professional style and should be edited, reviewed, and updated on a regular basis.

and for an author or a publicher:

● Who (what individual, company, business, foundation, etc.) is responsible for the website. ● Who (what individual, company, business, foundation, etc.) created the content on the page.

We need to find out what outside, independent sources say about the website. When there is disagreement between what the website says about itself and what reputable independent sources say about the website, we’ll trust the independent sources.

I don't know if this has anything to do with your particular content, but I guess you should be aware of it.