I was not blogging for last 4 days not because I was lazy. I was trying to read more on getting my picture along side with the search results when I write a blog on MixORG. Kind of the image you see below. I think all of you who write blogs would want that!
Although the feature has been around for some time but I don’t think all my friends who have a blog have taken advantage of it.
So, lets first talk about the advantages of this feature to people who are searching. If you read on the authorship feature, you will discover mention of rel=”author” meta tag. Basically it is a tag which tells the Google Search engine that who is the author of this article and also link the page to their Google+ Profile. The advantage of that to the people searching could be two:
a. When they see an article authored by someone who is also present on a social site like G+. They have a better chance to check the credibility of the author. Also, Google wants to use this as a credibility indicator of the result. So, spammers are less likely to link their G+ profile to their spammy articles.
b. Having a picture along side with search results might increase the chances for the link to be clicked!
So, if you are using wordpress like us and want to integrate this feature in your blog. You need to follow these three steps:
1. First go an create your G+ profile if not already and go to the contributors section and add your website link in it.
Check my G+ profile about section by clicking here and I have the screenshot of the contributors section you need to edit to add your domain link. You can see the MixORG (current) written in it. That is the place where you add the domain name in your G+ profile.
G+ Profile Contributors section screen shot
Make sure you make the link hidden in the plugin setting as it might look ugly otherwise. For us it was looking ugly!
or
Everytime you blog add a byline like ‘By Sachin Gaur” and make it a link pointing to your google+ profile but append to it a ?rel=author at the end of it. So, it should look something like this: https://plus.google.com/+SachinGaurMixORG?rel=author
3. Now go to your profile on the wordpress site and add your G+ Profile link. That’s it!
So how do you check that you are done?
Put the blog link in this Google Rich Snippet Tool and press preview. Does it show your profile picture of G+ profile? If yes then you are done. Like you can check my blog post results tested here in the tool.
I tested these steps for my colleague Richa and it worked. So, hope that it will work for you too! See screenshot below showing her authored article with her G+ Pic.
Richa Arora Author image for Search Results
Some more thoughts?
Also, I think more authors use this feature Google also gets an opportunity to evangelize the use of G+ social network. Which probably gets much lesser attention than Facebook. In last few years Google has done G+ integration with their other popular product. I was also wondering what Facebook and Bing have done in this domain. I did find some similar feature but that seems to be deprecated now!
I wonder in this business of identity while Google has products which can improve with the use of an identity but really does not have an identity network and Facebook has a good identity network but not the products that can benefit with the identity net!
by sachin gaur / mixorg team
