9:20 PM
Kira Permunian
With the launch of Google+ and the announcement from Matt Cutts, in an interview from Danny Sullivan last summer, claiming the authorship of your online content is becoming increasingly important. As part of Google’s resin d’etre for search and social they are rolling out author rank as part of their future updates to their ranking algorithm. This means that Google can rank web pages based on how popular an author is within their niche and if any influential peers have +1’d that piece of content. Also if your content is regularly scraped and syndicated it will help Google to understand who the author is and rank the original source of the content higher.
You also may have noticed in the Google search results, rich snippets with a picture of the article author and a link to their Google+ profile. There are some articles circulating that blogs are seeing a higher click through rate (CTR) when these images appear in the SERP’s. So with this in mind do you think it is important to add the Google Author markup to your website?
Implementing Google Authorship with rel=”author”
First you need to add the below code to your blog post if you have an author box then add the content in their (obviously you need to change the +Your Name & googleplusid for your actual information):
1
2 | <a href="https://plus.google.com/googleplusid
/about?rel=author">+Your Name</a>
|
Another way to add Google plus authorship to your site is to create a Google Plus badge. When you do so make sure that you choose the option Author and this will add the appropriate tags, you can then embed this on your blog.
Once the code or badge is added to your site you want to “close the loop”. To do this you want to go to your Google Plus page, select edit and under links add your blog to the “Contributor to” field.
Here’s a video from Google explaining the process:
Testing you have the rich snippet installed correctly on your web pages simply go to this web page and add your URL. If it is installed correctly you should see your Google plus profile image next to your article. Once the rich snippet is working you want to go to the Author request form and submit your details to let Google know of the update to your website.
It normally takes a couple of weeks for the rich snippets to start showing in the Search Results and it also depends upon how often your site is crawled. If you have any questions leave a comment below and I’ll help out.
About The Guest Author
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Chris Dyson is an SEO consultant from the UK and is the founder of Roots Web Solutions. You can follow him on Twitter @RootsWebSol.
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