Google Authorship
When your blog articles appear in Google Search results, you can have your website setup to display author information. The most common bits include the photo, the name and the number of Google+ circles the Author appears in. Through anecdotal evidence Blog Authorship Snippets can improve the clickthrough rate of your content. Putting a face to the content in the search results catches the eye, adds additional information to an otherwise bland result and perhaps you’ll recognize the author.
You can get authorship snippets for your articles as well. There are several guides as to how to do this around the web, and I have to defer to Google’s guide since they’ll keep it up to date. Here are the Google instructions to get Authorship information:
Author information in search results
The process requires Google+ profile, linking the profile to your domain. Linking the profile with the domain requires either the Google+ user’s email have the same domain as article or using rel=author markup to link site back to the profile. WordPress users can find plugins to make the updates while I personally use Yoast SEO plugin along with slight changes to my theme to accomplish this.
To test your authorship markup; go to the Google webmaster tools, Rich Snippets section. Enter your url with an article and it will check your authorship is setup correctly.
Google Publisher
The publisher is a way to correlate a business or brands with their content. Its can show your business logo in the search results instead of an Author photograph. To do this you must have a Google+ Business page to link to (if you have personal page, don’t link it) and add specific reciprocal links between the two. For wordpress users you can also reuse the same Yoast SEO plugin, or add the Google Publisher plugin or update your theme. In any case it should only take 5 minutes and certainly less than 30.
- To add the publisher for your site, first you add a link in your <header> section that points to your Google+ page. You’re only recommended to do this on your homepage and it is not necessary across all pages of your site.
- Point your Google+ business page to verify the rel=”publisher” mark up. In Google+, starting from your Dashboard select Edit Business Information > edit Contact Info > Website URL. There you add your website, e.g. hunch.wpengine.com. The navigation for this area has changed often and my navigation part of the Google Places for business integration so your navigation might be different.
- Validate your addition using the Google webmaster tools, Rich Snippets section.
