Wordpress for Beginners |New WordPress Magazine Themes

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Wordpress for Beginners

How to Get Google’s Verified Authorship for your WordPress Blog

Posted: 12 Jun 2012 10:02 AM PDT

Everyone is talking about how the search is going social. Google +1 buttons are now integrated in websites, search results, and even in Google Ads. Well all that is important, but we are now seeing a rise in verified Authorship for Google search results. Finally with the new redesign, we have added it in WPBeginner as well. Now when you search our articles, you will see the picture of our founder Syed Balkhi in the results like the screenshot below:

Google's Verified Authorship Results

We heard folks claiming that this is increasing click through rates and sometimes rankings as well. In this article, we will show you how you can get google’s verified authorship for your WordPress blog.

You need to add the following code in your theme’s <head> section. (Don’t forget to change the Google+ profile URL to yours). Normally you can do this by editing the header.php file

<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/101623299936375408403/posts" />

If you are using a theme framework or just want to put this in as a function, then you can add this by hooking into wp_head(). Paste the following code in your theme’s functions.php file.

  add_action('wp_head', 'add_google_rel_author');  function add_google_rel_author() {  echo '<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/101623299936375408403/posts" />';  }

Next thing you need to do is go to your Google+ profile, and add link to your website under the contributors section.

Add Website to Google+ Contributor Section

Lastly, make sure that your +1′s are public on your Google+ profile or this won’t work.

Now you are done. Simply wait for Google to re-crawl your pages and show your face next to it. You can check to see if you did everything right by going to the Google Webmasters Rich Snippets Testing Tool. Below is a screenshot of what it should look like.

Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool Preview

This trick would work great for sites with individual authors. If you are running a multi-author blog, then you would have to be a little more nifty. You can add an additional user profile field for Google+. Then run a conditional statement in the header area to see who is the author, and display the appropriate URL. Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin ~~will~~ now includes this feature in the newest version.

How to Get Google’s Verified Authorship for your WordPress Blog is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.