What is a Google Authorship?
Google Authorship allows you to link the content you write to your Google+ profile. Your headshot will appear beside your content in Google’s search results, giving your article more credibility. It not only looks more professional, but encourages people to click on it. This can help to build readership, increase sharability and give you ownership of the content you write across the internet. This is especially beneficial for people that regularly contribute to different blogs.
How to set it up
1. Use this link to make sure that your email address is verified: https://plus.google.com/authorship.
It will send you an email which you should click ‘Verify’ on. It may tell you that the link is not working, but you can go on to your Google+ profile and check if there is a tick beside your email address. If there is, then your email address is verified. However, if it does not work, you may need to add your email address into the ‘Work’ section of your profile.
2. Once you have done this, copy and paste the URL of your Google+ profile into the following code:
<a href=”YOURLINKrel=author”>View my Google profile</a>
It is important that you include the ‘rel=author’ as this is what allows Google to connect your authorship to the content.
3. Now copy and paste the entire above code into the end of the blog post that you want to link your profile to. Remember it is a HTML code so you will need to add it into the HTML section of the blog post. Alternatively, if you are an author on a WordPress blog, you can go onto the ‘Profile’ section of the dashboard and simply post a link to your Google+ page.
4. Google will now want to check that you are really affiliated with the website. Go to the ‘Contributor’ section of your Google+ profile and include a link to the webpage that your post is on. For example ‘https://www.miromedia.co.uk/blog.’
5. To test that everything is working, type in the URL to the blog post that you want your profile to show up for into the Google Structured Data Testing Tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets. If your image does show up, everything is working fine. However, if it doesn’t, there will be an error message to tell you where you are going wrong. It may take a while for it to begin showing up on Google, but it eventually will.
Over time, you can begin to build up your authorship ranking. You can use your Google+ profile to build your circles and interact with others. Comment on other blogs and write guest posts, which will allow Google to conclude that your voice is being heard throughout the internet.
Google Authorship not only establishes your writing, but establishes yourself as a writer.
