Ever since Google has released Google Plus, they have been favoring bloggers that promote the platform. With the social network, they also released a tool called blog authorship. Basically, your Google Plus profile image will display next to every blog post you publish on your website. Authorship not only makes people inclined to click on your link, but Google favors blogs that use it. Alongside Pagerank, they are using a new system called Author Rank to order search results. Author Rank can be obtained only by writing good, quality articles that have an attached profile, which is what this tutorial will be helping you do.
- The first step to implementing the Google Plus Authorship feature into your WordPress blog is to download the WordPress plugin.
- After the plugin is installed, activate it and go to your Google Plus profile.
- Copy your Google Plus URL and put it into the correct spot on your WordPres Profile page that can be found by going to Users > Your Profile.
- Go to Settings > Google Plus Author and scroll down to the bottom two options. I recommend replacing your author link with your Google Plus profile and turning off the link in the content section.
- Use the Google Rich Snippets tool to test your authorship profile. Enter a permalink in the box for an article you have written and see if it works.
That’s it! Your profile image will now automatically show up next to your blog posts in Google. Remember that if you have multiple authors, you have to add their Google Plus profiles by going to Users > All Users.
This is a very helpful post for those people that don’t know how to do this. If you are a new blogger, I suggest that you do this right away!
I agree! Now that this is tightly woven with SEO, there’s no reason not to.
This is a very interesting topic. I bought a WSO product on how to make Google Authorship. I was finding some parts of the lecture difficult to understand and I have been looking for the plugin to do this on my wordpress websites. Thank you for the time spent in putting this together.
I’m glad I could help you out! It is very easy to do by using this simple WordPress plugin.
Use http://www.gravatar.com – It will associate an email to an avatar. Most blogs are running WordPress, and most WordPress blogs use this service.
I use Gravatar, but the idea of Google Authorship is to display your picture in the Google SERPs, not on the blog comments and things like that.
Hello Ian, Thanks for the tutorial, It really helped me. Displaying the Google plus blog authorship is very important on search engine.
Thanks again.
I’m glad I could help! Now here’s a question for you… How do I make my WordPress image show up on other blogs when I comment? I know they show up on Omega Web, but if I comment on another WordPress blog, it won’t appear… I’m asking you because I saw that your image appeared!