Author schema: the markup your consultant's profile page is missing

Google's quality raters assess medical content against E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. In a YMYL category that framework decides whether a page ranks or disappears. The difficulty is that raters are guidelines and algorithms are code — and code needs the credentials in a form it can parse.

What the markup has to carry

Author schema is JSON-LD naming who wrote or reviewed a page. For a clinician it should carry full name, qualifications, medical registration number, affiliations, specialty, and links to independently verifiable profiles.

The four failures we find on almost every site

Person instead of Physician. Generic Person schema says a human wrote this. Physician says a registered medical professional did. That distinction is the entire point.

No medicalSpecialty field. Without it nothing at entity level separates a cardiologist from a dermatologist, and the model infers specialty from surrounding text — badly and inconsistently.

No sameAs links. These connect the profile to PubMed, ORCID, a council register, a hospital staff page. A credential asserted only on your own domain is an assertion; the same credential cross-linked to a register is evidence.

No review attribution. If a consultant medically reviews an article, the page needs a reviewedBy property pointing at their Physician entity. Otherwise the review happened for the reader and not for the machine.

The work involved

Build one complete Physician entity per clinician, once. Attach it to every page they author or review. Validate it. Then re-validate after every template change, because a CMS update will break it eventually and it will fail without warning.