Learn About Google Authorship Tags
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
How To Set Up Author Tag
Part 1 material referenced is from DKS Systems Blog
Adding the rel=author tag gives you credibility and exposure. It helps your content stand out and people are more likely to click on a post with the author picture than one that doesn’t have the author’s picture. Jill Whalen has a great post about the 5 reasons you need to use rel=author on your content – check it out.
How to add the rel=author snippet to your content
What You’ll Need:
- An author profile that displays on every post that’s published. See mine to the right.
- A Google Plus profile.
- Content, blog, articles, etc. Preferably frequently updated
Steps:
- Include the URL of your blog, articles, etc. in the “Contributor to” section of your Google Plus profile.
- Include a link to your Google Plus profile in your author bio. (See the G+ call-out in my bio to the right.) You can include an HTML link, even if there is no WYSIWYG editor. Here’s what my link looks like: <a rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/107407162734362573540“>Circle Dorothy on Google+!</a> You can simply swap out the highlighted areas with your profile URL and name.
- Test your markup using the rich snippets testing tool. Enter in a recent blog post and click the “Preview” button to see if you’ve correctly implemented the rel=author tag.
(Note: Your rich snippets may appear in the preview, but may not appear in the search results for a couple days. That’s what happened to me!)
What I also Did…
So, because Google gives you two ways to add this markup to your content, I did both of them, just to be safe. All that’s needed for this step is to have an email address from the same domain as you publish your content.
What You’ll Need:
- Email address with same domain as your published content.
- Google Plus profile.
- A byline on each page of your content containing your name. (Ex: By Courtney Petty)
Steps:
- Sign-up for authoriship. (Must be logged into your Google Plus account to view this page properly.)
- Make sure you read the fine print on this page before you sign up; as the email address you submit will be added to the Work section of your G+ profile.
- Test using the rich snippets testing tool.
Part 2 material referenced is by SEO Trainings SW
Today Google is beginning to factor in ALL the content you publish online; including videos, tweets, images, Google +’s in it’s attempt to rank you as a trusted author.
And the higher your authorship status, the higher Google will rank the sites you’re associated with.
In other words, all those sneaky tricks and programs that have been around to trick Google into believing your site should outrank your competitors are not going to work anymore.
What is going to count is your online reputation with Google in publishing high quality content, i.e. Google’s Author Rank.
Why Did Google Do This?
Well, Google’s primary customers are the people who use their search engine to find information about various things and not “us,” the people who try sell various things online.
In other words, it’s Google’s job to provide the most relevant information to their customers and to keep what they consider spammy content out of their index.
Google’s new authorship is their latest answer.
Developed by the engineers over at Google to reduce spam, it’s designed to interface with Google+ and their search engine to monitor and rate the popularity of your content.
If Google rates you as someone that develops “spammy content” your content will never rank high in their search engine regardless of what type of SEO you do.
If Google rates you as someone that develops “high quality content,” your content will rank well in their SERPs (search engine result pages).
Should I Care About Google’s Authorship?
Well if you want to have a successful online business and have high rankings in Google’s SERPs, you need to care. And to be successful, you need to build an awesome reputation that is associated with YOUR NAME and not the name of your business!
How To Build Your Awesomeness with Google
The first step is to create a Google + account if you don’t already have one.
The second step is then to associate your authorship for all of your online content, which includes videos, photos, articles, Twitter account, etc. to your Google + account.
Google’s Author Rank Factors
There is no way to know all of the Google’s authorship factors that are programmed into this algorithm. Google wants to make it as complex as possible to avoid having spammy results listed in their search engine.
However, these are a few factors I’m sure that they have taken into account to rank you as a trusted author:
- The page rank of the article
- The average page rank of your content associated with your authorship
- The number of social shares such as Twitter, Google+
- The number of social circles you’re included in on Google+
- And the number of posts you make on Google+