If you haven’t heard yet, Google is looking for new ways to authenticate quality links. People are doing a lot more social sharing and a lot less backlinking these days. One way Google has decided to sort through the garbage to find the gems on the internet is through their Google Authorship program. So if you’re interested in getting ranked higher on search results and stand out among the millions then it’s time to let Google know who wrote all that great content.
Single Author Blog
Link your content to your Google+ profile using a verified email address
- 1. Make sure your email is on the same domain as your content (Example: [email protected] will work for me because I post my content on SteamFeed.com)
- 2. Make sure that each article published has a “by Author’s Name” so that Google can figure out who wrote it (Example: by DJ Thistle or Author: DJ Thistle).
- 3. Go to the Google Authorship Page and submit your email.
Set up Google Authorship by linking your content to your Google+ profile
- 1. Create a link somewhere on your website using the following tag:
<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>
Keep in mind that profile_url should be replaced with your Google+ profile url (Example:https://plus.google.com/u/0/102486083051661481149).
- 2. Go to your Google Plus profile About Page and add your website as a site you contribute to.
Make sure you’re in edit mode and you click on custom link.
- 3. Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to see if everything worked out for you by entering in the url of one of your articles (Example: When I enter in Daniel Hebert’s latest post “http://www.steamfeed.com/3-sure-fire-ways-to-get-the-job-interviews-you-really-want/” I get the image below).
If you’re still having trouble check out this YouTube video:
Multi Author Blog
You can either have each individual author link to their Google plus profile on each article using: <a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a> or if your website has individual author bio pages then they can just link back to Google Plus right from there.
The easiest way I’ve found to set this up is to use a plugin. WordPress has a great plugin called: Google Author Link.
Note: It may take up to 14 days for your profile image to appear next to your articles on Google.
Are you using the new Google Authorship program? Have you seen any increase in your search results? Please leave a comment below.
Note: One of our SteamFeed Authors, Ray Hiltz, was kind enough to add this in the comments but I felt it was important enough to put into the article.
“One thing I would add is that if the snippet doesn’t appear in the Webmaster Tools Test, it might be because you haven’t put your site on the Google+ profile page in the “www” url format. i.e. “www.steamfeed.com or “http://www.steamfeed.com”. “
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Thanks for sharing guys! I was recently investigating this, great timing!
Glad you found it useful Shayn!
Great resource, DJ. I'm finding more and more people using it if the amount of avatars on SERP's indicate anything.
One thing I would add is that if the snippet doesn't appear in the Webmaster Tools Test, it might be because you haven't put your site on the Google+ profile page in the "www" url format. i.e. "www.steamfeed.com or "http://www.steamfeed.com".
Thanks for posting this.
Thanks so much Rayhiltz!! I'm going to use this on my website http://pokeflirt.com
I promise to use my knowledge for good, and not evil.
And thanks DJ for posting this, I've been looking everywhere for google authorship help.
Great piece DJ, and a wonderful point. I don't understand why people don't utilize the power of Google plus more. After all they are the largest search engine in the US. I know I am guilty of not fully utilizing it's power, and I use more than a lot. Ha ha thanks for an easy, informative piece…
Thanks for commenting Gerry. Honestly, if you're a blogger in any form you really need to be following Google's evolution in search and this author program may be a huge part of it in the future.
Excellent point Ray. I'm going to add that tip to the end of the article. Thanks!
Great info DJ, thank you for posting this! This is very much worth doing. :)
Appreciate the kind words Paul. Thanks for taking the time to share and comment. :)
My pleasure! :)
Every blogger or a small business should really make use of this feature. I have been using it since June and I can see that the Organic traffic to my site has increased tremendously. Even if I am not on the 3-5 position in the first page of Google, I can see that still people check me out because my content is featured in SERP with my Google+ profile.
I do see that even mid-size companies are using the profiles of a company employee's Google+ profile to increase the visibility.
Thanks for the added info here Annetta! Glad to see Google Authorship is working out for you. :)
I am trying to implement google authorship for my work… our emails are slight different then our domain name. Does anyone know how to get it to work with those being different?
Stephen,
Basically you need to tell Google that you're the author of your website by using: < a href="[profile_url]?rel=author" >Your Author's Name < / a > , like I mention in the article. Feel free to email me with your website name and more details of your problem and I'll do my best to help you out.
Have you tried a plugin?
[email protected]
Great article. The instructions on how to do it are clear too. Appreciate Rays "www" addition too. Thanks guys for helping us all.
Thanks Diana! Glad you enjoyed the article and yes Ray's comment was very helpful. :)
Thanks so much for this, I've been hearing more and more about Google Autthorship. I've done everything and when I check it it says "verified' but there are errors with the 'hatomentry'. Do you know what that means?
I've used the WP Google Authorship plug in and updated the functions.php on my site. Do you know how I can fix it or who I can ask to help?
Thanks so much.
Sally
Sally, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I'll see what I can do about helping you get it set up. :)
Hello DJ Thistle, I have found your blog while touring in the blog land. I was searching for some informative article on Google Authorship. I want to set up my own Authorship for my Blog. But I was failed every time. Because it is a Multi-Author blog. After reading your article I can set up my Authorship Profile. Thanks a lot mate. Love to see more information on latest updates from you. I am creating 1 video about this particular topic. All credit goes to you and your lovely blog article. Keep it up mate.
You're welcome Atanu! :) Glad you found it useful. Let me know when that video come out.
I tried to fix my Google Authorship mid of last year but something kept going wrong. Anyway, thanks to your post I was able to get to to work–well at least as far as the "Structured Data Testing Tool" is concerned. I still don't see my avatar when I search for my blog on google but it's fine on the testing tool. Any insights as to why this is happening? :D Thanks, DJ.
Anne, send me an email [email protected] and I'll see if I can help you. :)
I appreciated this article, but adding Google Authorship didn't work for me. I tested a link and my picture didn't show up. I also tried to insert the code into my web coding and received a 500 Internal Server Error, which freaked me out. I finally figured out how to 'fix' it and got my website back online and WP admin login page to work again. Sigh.
Amandah, send me an email at [email protected] and I'll see if I can help you. :)
I received an email recently from Google that I've already established my authorship wherein my profile can now appear next to my content in search results, I tried searching in Google search but some of my contents does not have my profile, I'm just wondering why?
Wondering if this is for Blogs only? If I design websites that are not blogs, can I add authorship to the websites I created / maintain?
Thanks for the great article – I'm just wondering, do you have to have a domain email address for this to work? I tried adding my blog to my Google+ profile and it said I needed to authenticate my account by adding an email address that was the same as the domain name.
Hi DJ, lets say you find writers in your niche and get them to write articles on your site and they have also built up alot of author rank (active google+ account, tones of social media followers), from my understanding you cannot leverage their author rank for your site since their google+ profile needs to be connected to your site?
Unless it connected, you will not get any author rank benefit?
But in order for my blog/site to receive any benefit they need to add it to the “Contributor To” section of their Google Plus profiles. Is that right?
My only concern is that they can remove it from their contribute to profile, when they are no longer contributing. If they remove my site from their contribute to on google plus, do you think they will be a negative impact, will their face still show up against the article they have written in the search results?
Cheers,
Chris
Hi Chris,
I can tell you that if the author does not have your website connected to their G+ profile then they won't show up in google searches with their profile (I know this because when we updated our site some of our authors got disconnected on our end and their articles stopped showing up with their images in search). I don't know if it has a negative impact but I'm guessing not, however, you probably lose the benefits of having the author connected (so I guess it's negative by losing the positive).
Question for you: Why would your authors want to take your website off of their G+ websites they contribute to? They'll lose the benefits of added exposure.
I hope this helps.
DJ
Thanks for the tip, I was doing wrong by using rel as link attribution.
This solved my problem.
Glad it worked out for you Sadek! :) Thanks for stopping by SteamFeed.
Very useful post, I already did most of the steps but my picture never appear in the Webmaster Tools Test. Thank to your first commenters Rauhiltz I'm pretty sure the problem is because I never used the "www" format. Thanks guys ;)
Glad you were able to get some use out of this article Cedric! Thanks for taking the time to comment and I look forward to seeing you around SteamFeed. :)
Can you help me please? I followed your instruction, but when I use the Google structured testing tool this is the message I get….
Warning: This information will not appear as a rich snippet in search results, because it seems to describe an organization. Google does not currently display organization information in rich snippets
Warning: Missing required field "name (fn)".
I don't know what this means or how to fix it. My domain name is http://www.ohmy-creative.com
Thanks,
Susan
Susan, Did you use the verify email method or the link your content to your G+ profile?
I believe I did everything you suggested. I added the link back to my google+ page, changed my email to the one that has my domain name in it and verified the email address. I got the impression that google thinks I am a certain kind of organization website…maybe because I have a hyphen? I don't know! I didn't understand the warning messages and what I should do to correct the problem? Thought maybe you would know?
Thanks for any help!
I wanted to let you know that I think I resolved my problem. When I submit using The Structural Data Testing Tool it now shows up as accepted with my image in place. It still does not show up in the search of a post, but maybe that takes a few days.
What I had done wrong was that I did not have a link on the home page or sidebar that included the full author link (?rel=author) as soon as I added that to the link on my sidebar and retested…it worked! My original link was on my about page. Thanks for the great article!
Quite effective and informative article! Making ranked higher on search results and increasing traffic is important for a website success. Content as written by the following Google rule is efficient to increase your website ranked on search results. Graceful can read of this informative input. Thanks a lot and look forward to know more!
This is soo important in your fight to battle the search engine rankings. Google is doing a good job in providing the social proof to providing high quality page rankings. This is the future folks. Best to start getting your sites claimed thru Google Authorship
I was trying to setup this up in WordPress but your tutorial makes it easier to understand. Thanx!
Just got back from a conference where we were talking about Google plus profile and business pages but what is the point for a blogger to have a brand page? It doesn't show up in the search engine. The profile yes but not the page.