Establishing Google Authorship

When it comes to Google authorship, it is critical that you go through the process and set up the authorship for as many authors as you have on your website. Ironically, it may not be as simple as you as you think to set up the authorship.

What is Google Authorship?

Google authorship refers to the project by Google, which has given us a set of methods to place our original content anywhere on the web and our Google+ profiles. Google authorship allows a person eligibility to get the authorship-rich snippet in search results: the author’s profile photo, the result, and a byline that clicks through to the author’s profile, (sometimes) the amount of Google+ circles in which the author is involved, and a link to additional search results for that author’s related content.

Determining what you have first

The first thing that you need to establish is how many authors you actually have. If you have more than one author (including you), does each one of your authors have an “About” page on your website? If that is not the case, that needs to happen as quickly as possible.  On the other hand, if you are the only author on your website, it will be very easy to set up your “About Me” page.

In the event of your website having several authors

If you have multiple authors on your website, you will have to arrange it so that each article (that is written by someone else), you will have to include a byline for that particular author. That byline should be hyperlinked. You can either add the name manually or you can link it within your website template. Both methods will work fine All that is important is that you put the name in. It is important to allow your readers to “get to know” the other authors so that they can build a relationship with those people if they wish to do so.

Mutual linking

Whichever way you choose to present the authors of the content on your website, it is critical that you link the name back to your website from your profile on Google+. You will do this by inserting a text link to either your blog’s homepage or your website in the section called “Contributor to” section of Google+. The reason that this is important is that it lets Google+ know that the person who owns the profile is the same person who is claiming attribution of the article. It is protection against plagiarism.  Linking back and forth (or reciprocal linking) is a relatively painless part of the process but you still need to make sure to remember to do it. You must also remember to ask all of your other content contributors to give you a link to their profiles as well.

Make sure that it works

Once you have established the links, you should verify that they actually work. You can do that by using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. If you test it, you will be able to determine any issues that may have occurred while you were setting up the links. If you see that everything has been set up correctly and things seem to be functioning, there may still be cases when your web page will not appear in the search results that are connected to one of your authors’ names. When it comes to choosing your photograph and the photographs of your other authors, make sure to choose a good-quality headshot. A passport photograph is perfect, if you want to use that. Remember that it may take a little while (several weeks in some cases) before the information about your authorship shows up. Don’t worry. It will show up. You just need to have a little patience.

Why is setting up Google authorship important?

There are actually calculated reasons for setting up Google+ authorship. It is definitely not random. Of course, it is an excellent thing to set up but that is far from the only reason to do it. The reasons are:

• People in your Google+ circles can view to which blogs you are contributing content. This can increase your readership.
• Your website pages can be differentiated from the website pages of your competitors.
• Your page rankings on the search engines will be higher.
• You can undo whatever you have done. It is not set in stone.

Conclusion

Establishing Google authorship will ultimately draw new readers to you and eventually, that can definitely mean increased business. It is worth setting up Google authorship and it is not a painstaking process in the least. You won’t lose much by setting it up and if you decide in the future that it isn’t for you, you can take it away at any time. Author attribution is critical to your success and it lends credibility to your way of doing business and demonstrates clearly that you are transparent. There are many tools that can help you to establish authorship and they will give you step-by-step instructions. You will have gone through the process before you know it.