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What is Google Authorship?

Posted on by Donncha Hughes — 5 Comments ↓
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Donncha Hughes

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Donncha Hughes is a mentor, trainer and business advisor. I deliver group and one to one training on Wordpress. My background is assisting business with development of marketing, business plans, grant and finance applications. See www.startuphughes.com for more...


When you write a blogpost, and Google presents it in a list of results following a search, your Google+ image will appear in the results if Google Authorship is activate. People are then more likely to click on the result and visit your WordPress blogpost.

Google Authorship Donncha Hughes

Google Authorship helps with SEO (see this article for more on the issue of rankings). It works for your own site and is well worth setting up as per this blogpost which lists  7 Google Authorship benefits beyond SEO.

It also works on other sites that you contribute to.

Google Authorship Tweak Your Biz

The starting point and all the instructions are on this page from Google

https://plus.google.com/authorship

A few comments on the instructions:

#1For this to work you have to have a Google+ account. The google account should be based on the email that is attached to your blog (ie donncha@startuphughes.com for my blog based at startuphughes.com/blog). You may have set up a Google account with your gmail. I think you can add (merge) your business email to this account or go ahead and set up another Google account https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount so that your business email is your primary email. Click on the option to use your own email address and not a gmail email account.

 #2 The instructions require that the same name as the Google account be mentioned as the author. A byline with your name is automatically added by WordPress so I suggest that you create an Editor with your own name and assign all posts to your own name as opposed to Admin which might be the default setting.
Once this is set up, Google Authorship is active for all Blogposts.
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Donncha Hughes is a mentor, trainer and business advisor. I deliver group and one to one training on Wordpress. My background is assisting business with development of marketing, business plans, grant and finance applications. See www.startuphughes.com for more...

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  • Pingback: SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for Getting Irish Business Online Websites()

  • Thanks for sharing my post about Google+ and SEO!

    • Mark – a very good post about Google+ and SEO so delighted to include in my post. Well done.

  • Thank you for sharing my post about Google+ and SEO! Much appreciated

    A couple of other notes to add to the mechanics piece of Google Authorship – Don’t be alarmed if your picture doesn’t show up right away or on every result.

    I was nearly going crazy trying to figure out why mine wasn’t showing up. I located a section in the Google Webmaster Tools Help section is that helped – “Author information not appearing: – here’s a link

    http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1306778

    The first sentence is: “Google will only show authorship in search results when we think it will be useful to the user.”

    I’m not sure what the criterion is that determines whether or not the authorship profile to display, but my take on it (based on the opening sentence) is that it is not always going to appear.

    If you’ve tested it using the tool, then you’re good to go 🙂

    • Beth – you wrote a really good post about Google+ and SEO and the reference fitted nicely into my piece. Thanks so much for your added note. I had noticed that some of my posts had my photo and others had not. It is cool when it does appear particularly on guest blogs for other sites. As for uncertainty about criterion used by Google, are we surprised! regards donncha

      • Donncha – too true about Google and not quite knowing what the criterion is 🙂