Google Authorship Tips & Tricks: Everything You Need To Know About Google Authorship

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Google Authorship is the technique that makes it possible to display the picture of an author of a post or article in Google’s search results. Authorship uses rich snippets, which are small pieces of structured information (text) containing information about the author. The information contained in the snippets is provided by the author via the Google+ profile or page. This is taken from the About and Description part of the profile or page. In this post, we will cover every little thing about Google Authorship and all of its benefits for you.

Description & Terminology

Setting up authorship usually refers to the action of linking the Google+ profile of an author to a page in which content is written by them. In this context, we should interpret the term “author” loosely, as it can be “anyone who has published some content to the internet that they created themselves”. Google Authorship extends this with the technological solution’s that enable anyone to claim that authorship for any content only needing a Google+ profile and some markup that has to be set up just once. Moreover, their authorship and accompanying body of work has become part of the public domain for all to take note of.

Authorship is often linked to author rank and some seem to think that the ranking and SEO has become the end goal. Unfortunately, it’s not. If you want to be successful with authorship, then it’s just like any other job or business: never look for an instant way.

In this cheat sheet you will learn how to set this up using an example in which we are linking an internet page to a Google+ profile. The choice for a profile has to do with the fact that everybody has a personal profile, but not everybody has a page. This works almost the same for a Google+ business page and also for a Google+ local page.

Ten Golden Rules for Google+ Marketing

1. Establish your mission, vision, goals and strategy. However, keep it as simple as possible (max. 2 pages).

2. Define your target groups and engage with them where they are at that moment (channels).

3. Choose at least 10 keywords from the above that you will use whenever possible in every post.

4. Always use your profile as the central spill for all Google+ marketing.

5. Set up a complete profile with a picture of yourself and use all the keywords in the About section.

6. People attract people and a following is the way to grow your following.

7. Content is king for all author rank based content marketing strategies.

8. Engagement is the tool of the trade for generating exposure and leads.

9. Content we create are marketing activities and content is a marketing asset to be used to the fullest.

10. Treat every contact as if it’s a potential lead to new business.

Troubleshooting articles and resources

Article attributed to the wrong author (M. Traphagen moz.com)

Tools to help setup authorship and check the markup

Structured Data Testing Tool (Google): will let you test the authorship annotation (rel=author/publisher).

Webmaster Tools Author stats (Google): will show statistical data for an author if applied correctly.

Authorship Q&A from the official Google Webmaster Blog

These questions were answered by Matt Cutts on August 2013:

1. What kind of pages can be used with authorship?

You can increase the likelihood that Google shows authorship for your site by only using authorship markup on pages that meet these criteria:

• The URL/page contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or single piece of content, by the same author. This means that the page isn’t a list of articles or an updating feed. If the author frequently switches on the page, then the annotation is no longer helpful to searchers and is less likely to be featured.

• The URL/page consists primarily of content written by the author.

• Showing a clear byline on the page, stating the author wrote the article and using the same name as used on their Google+ profile.

2. Can I use a company mascot as the author and have the authorship annotation in search results? For my pest control business, I’d like to write as the “Pied Piper.”

You’re free to write articles in the manner you prefer. Your users may really like the Pied Piper idea. However, for authorship annotation in search results, Google prefers to feature a human who wrote the content. By doing so, authorship annotation better indicates that a search result is the perspective of a person, and this helps add credibility for searchers. Again, because currently we want to feature people, a link authorship markup to an individual’s profile rather than linking to a company’s Google+ Page.

3. If I use authorship on articles available in different languages, such as example.com/en/article1.html for English and example.com/fr/article1.html for the French translation, should I link to two separate author/Google+ profiles written in each language?

In your scenario, both articles: example.com/en/article1.html and example.com/fr/article1.html should link to the same Google+ profile in the author’s language of choice.

4. Is it possible to add two authors for one article?

In the current search user interface, we only support one author per article, blog post, etc. We’re still experimenting to find the optimal outcome for searchers when more than one author is specified.

5. How can I prevent Google from showing authorship?

The fastest way to prevent authorship annotation is to make the author’s Google+ profile not discoverable in search results. Otherwise, if you still want to keep your profile in search results, then you can remove any profile or contributor links to the website, or remove the markup so that it no longer connects with your profile.

6. What’s the difference between “rel=author” and “rel=publisher”?

rel=publisher helps a business create a shared identity by linking the business’ website (often from the homepage) to the business’ Google+ Page. rel=author helps individuals (authors!) associate their individual articles from a URL or website to their Google+ profile. While rel=author and rel=publisher are both link relationships, they’re actually completely independent of one another.

7. Can I use authorship on my site’s property listings or product pages since one of my employees has customized the description?

Authorship annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real person’s perspective or analysis on a topic. Since property listings and product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using authorship in these cases. However, an article about products that provides helpful commentary, such as, “Camera X vs. Camera Y: Faceoff in the Arizona Desert” could have authorship.

8. Can I use authorship markup for images in Google Images?

Authorship annotation is useful to Image Search as we can see who was the author of the work that it was embedded in. This may give us a better indication of the quality of the image if we know the author. It is not known up to now (22nd of October 2013) if it has any (positive) effect on the position of the image in the search engine result page order for images and the positioning of images in it.

9. When I want to be sure that all of the content on my website has authorship annotation should I then place a hyperlink with the rel=”author” tag to my Google+ profile that is visible everywhere on my website?

No. Do not place any hard coded or otherwise always visible hyperlinks with the rel=”author” tag on your website. This will cause problems for instance when it is displayed as the first link to an author archive. Also this can cause some author to become the default author in case there are no author and Google needs to assign one. Read more on how to apply authorship markup for Google Images.

10. Is it best to not to have authorship annotation with rel=”author” for the front page of my blog?

Yes for blogs it will mostly be the best option to not apply authorship annotation on the front page of the blog. This is because usually there are several posts from more than one author and these articles are annotated with authorship markup on the page that shows the full article contents. Because of the fact that there is no direct need to have this annotation on your front page combined with the fact that it brings along the risks for causing problems down the road it is best not to apply when in doubt or not all if there is no acute need other than that authorship it does not work for the blog. A front page should be linked with the rel=”publisher” tag which is done automatically by placing a Google+ badge.

Setting up authorship markup (rel=”author”)

Authorship markup is all about the relation tag rel=”author” and the rel=”publisher” tag. The key point is that an article get’s a rel=author tag and a page get’s linked with the rel=publisher. We need to remember that we don’t want the publisher markup on articles and don’t want the author markup on things that do not constitute an article or text like an image gallery or the front page of a web shop.

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