Have been battling with getting my websites and blog set up so that authorship of the blog and website pages points to me Google+ profile which in turn creates some proof of ownership of my website and blog because of the link. A side effect is that when you search Google for something and I happen to have written something about it (or if in fact you are searching for me website via Google) a little picture of my mug will come up next to the search result – which I recon is kind of cool.
I had some problems getting the blog set up. The two major problems I had were:-
- Understanding the significance/difference between rel=author tag and rel=me tag.
- Making sure the web-link in my profile were available to be viewed by anyone.
So what were the lessons learned I hear you say?
- The rel = author tag basically tells Google search engine that the page with this tag in it is a very important page and (in the case of a wordpress blog) to look at the page with that tag to then look for the html tag rel = me. In turn, the rel=me tag points the search engine to my Google profile which as a result “connects” my blog to my Google+ profile. I guess a parallel are some of the sites that allow you to “claim” website as your, e.g. claimID.com or the Verisign VIP service (via OpenID)
- One of the steps in the process is to make sure that your Google+ profile has a website link that points to your website (or blog) that you linking to your Google+ profile from, ie, the website that you have just added the rel=author or rel=me tags (or both) on. Just make sure that the links on your Google+ page are available to be viewed by everyone, not just those in your circles (like I did). If you restrict visibility to only those in your circle you will not obtain the full benefit of Google Authorship.
There are a few sites to look at about all this. The main ones I used for my WordPress blogs were:-
- Google site about it all – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1408986
- and most importantly, in relation to WordPress blog – http://www.ryantmalone.com/seo/google-authorship-markup-verification-tutorial-for-bloggers/
These two sites should get you on yor merry way.
Enjoy your head next to search results with your site in it!