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I've launched a website that has tide data and maritime weather for a number of UK seaside locations.

Each location on my site has a 7 day forecast of tide and weather for that given location. This data is provided by an external source (UK hydrographic office) and displayed on the page (mainly as figures in tables). There isn't much else in the way of content on each location (here's an example of typical content of a location page: www.ketosea.com/location/conwy).

I've added the article structured data to the page, but would adding authorship (my Google+) damage my SEO, as I'm not the writer of the content per se? Obviously if it was a blog post or user generated content, I wouldn't even question adding authorship.

I've read through a number of articles regarding the importance of authorship, but I'm obviously keen to avoid any damage it would have to the indexing process. Google has only indexed 6 pages of over 1200 with no crawl errors or recommendations in Webmaster Tools, and am curious to know if authorship will improve this.

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This isn't an article or similar content. this is just generic data (that isn't even unique). There is no author for this content which definitely means you aren't the author of that content. You are the publisher. You should not be using authorship on these pages.

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  • Thanks for the advice. I'm questioning whether anything in schema.org matches my content. I did consider using QuantitativeValue but there isn't a unitCode I can attribute. I arrived at using the article schema after noticing that BBC have a content type of 'article' on their tide data
    – ThePHPUnicorn
    Jul 23, 2014 at 14:07

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