Authorship on Google Search
I’ve recently been investigating how to better attribute articles on this blog to myself as the author. I know I write them, but how do I communicate that to the rest of the world?
One way is to use microformats and semantic web techniques, but even for my small website, that would be a time consuming change. There is however, one small and easy thing you can do to improve attribution in Google search results.
Google will show Google+ profile information for articles you publish, if you provide a link on the page to the Google+ profile (and complete a few other steps). You can find all of the details on Google, but for me, this amounted to 5 minutes of work.
- Add a link on the page to your Google+ profile, with the tag ?rel=author, for example https://plus.google.com/115055615462502452987?rel=author
- Verify your email at https://plus.google.com/authorship 3. Verify everything is working at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Hopefully Google will soon display results with my picture.