Google+ and Author / Publisher Markup

Rob GarnerApril 25, 2013

About Me

• Independent consultant focused on strategic development

• VP of SEMPO

• Founding member of DFWSEM Association, past president

• Longtime speaker at Pubcon – 7th year

• Member of WebmasterWorld since 2001

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Search and Social: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Content Marketing

• Covers interdependent search and social concepts

• Social signals on search

• Interview with Brett Tabke and many others

• 406 pages

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Authorship Markup

Without content, search engines, social networks,

and web sites do not exist

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Without authors and publishers, quality

content does not exist

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How can search engines measure the trust and

authority of content creators across multiple publishing

entities?

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The Publisher Graph of the Internet

• Google has already created a web graph to identify publishers of content, and it has been in use since the beginning of the Google search engine

• Marketers and publishers have typically looked at standard SEO metrics for identifying qualitative and quantitative attributes of trusted publishers to return in the search results pages

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The Author Graph

• Measures influence, authority, and theme, just the way Google measures other digital assets

• Your influence is reflected by the quality and theme of the publications you write for, and by the relative social signals for those properties

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Wanna know how Google+ Authorship works? Use your SEO sensibilities

• People (authors) are nodes, just like websites are nodes

• Your author ID is a unique ID, just like a URL

• Connections between an author and content can be measured just like connections between links

• Author and publisher content also has keyword inference, themes and authority, just like links and websites

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For G+ Authors, Content Contribution is the New Link

• In the world of authorship markup, a blog post or other content contribution on a reputable publisher site is like a link to your author profile

• When Google recognizes your work on another site, it has the potential to carry the trust and weight of that publisher toward the author profile, even though there is not always a direct link

• Content across varying entities helps determine the author’s authority, trust (as opposed to being spam), and general content theme

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YOU

Publ 1 Publ 2

Publ 6

Publ 5 Publ 4

Publ 3

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Authorship: Connect the properties you write for in your G+ Profile using Links

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But Google will connect both linked and scraped resources to your profile

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SearchMarketingStandard.com Not listed in my profile

Wiley.com Not listed in my profile

SiteProNews.com Not listed in my profile

Establish a link back from the publications you write for

• Once you have linked to your publications in the Contributor To section of your profile page, you must also create a link back from your profile pages on the third party sites

• If you contribute to your own sites, this will be easier to complete because you have more control to add this link yourself or have someone in your company do it for you

• If you are publishing on sites that you do not own, you will need to have an administrator place these links back to your profile.

• The link on the publishing site must include the rel=author attribute and link back to your profile on Google+. Your profile link should look like this:

<a href="https://plus.google.com/2222221111112?rel=author">Google</a>

• Be patient, because it may take up to several weeks to start appearing in the search results.

• You can also use the Google rich snippet tool to test your authorship markup, but remember that proper implementation does not guarantee that your markup will appear in the search results.

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Establishing Authorship with a Verified Email Address

• A second method of verifying your connection between a website and Google is with a verified email address.

• This email address should contain the domain of the site that you publish on and that was submitted in the box on the following URL: https://plus.google.com/authorship.

• Once your email address has been authenticated, Google will add your address to the Work section of your profile. You can then edit your profile to make it private or adjust the settings of who should see your contact info.

• Make sure that all of your articles contain a byline with a brief description of who you are and that each article you wrote is preceded with “by.” Google looks for snippets of text that contain the phrase “by+Author+Name” as a signal to reinforce authorship.

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Establishing Authorship Using WordPress Plug-ins

• There are a variety of different WordPress plug-ins to help you quickly establish rel=author for your individual authors or blogs with multiple authors. Here are two examples of plug-ins to help get you going:

• Authorsure: This plug-in works for both single-author and multiauthor WordPress blogs http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/authorsure/

• Google Authorship for Multiple Authors: This tool is designed mainly for blogs with multiple authors, and its creator states that it needs to be customized in order to work for single-author blogs

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-authorship-for-multiple-writers/

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Publisher Markup

Publishers: Get a Google Badge

• Google Badge is a way to connect your website directly to your Google profile

• Google “strongly recommends” that webmasters and publishers make this connection.

• Google also refers to it as an “enhanced version of the +1 button”

• In effect, it creates a sort of handshake between your main web asset and your Google+ presence and verifies your web presence with Google as a publisher

• Read more about Google Badges at https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/badge/config.

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Publishers: Get a Google Badge

• Two other ways to confirm ownership of your site with Google:

1) Create a rel="publisher" link from the main page of your website to your Google+ page. The link code follows:

<a rel="publisher" href="https://plus.google.com/YourGoogle+AcctURLHere">Find us on Google+</a>

2) If you don’t want to put the link on your public-facing page, you can include the following code in the head section of your main page:

<link rel="publisher" href="https://plus.google.com/[yourpageID]" />

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Thank you

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Rob Garnerrgarner1@gmail.com214.676.2089@robgarner