Enable Google Authorship step by step
In order to enable
Google Authorship for your forum, you need perform the tasks below:
- Sign up a Google+ account using an email on your domain (in my case, aspplayground.net)
- Sign up to participate in Google Authorship and verify your email you use in step 1
- Add a special header link in your page's HTML source
Once you have done the above, whenever Google shows your pages on its SERP (search engine result page), it will present your pages like this:
1. Sign up for Google+ using an email on your domain
If you haven't done so, you can sign up an account
here. Make sure you
- Sign up using an email on your domain (e.g. in my case, abc@aspplayground.net)
- Upload a clear headshot as the profile photo. This will be the shown beside your page result
2. Sign up to participate in Google Authorship, and verify your email
Sign in to your Google+ account first, and then go to this page to
sign up for Google Authorship.
Simply type in your email and it'll ask you to verify the email address by sending you an email with a link you need to click on. It is very straightforward.
Once you've verified the address, on your Google+ profile's About section, you'll see you've become a contributor to your domain (I had an old profile photo):
This is all you need to link up your Google Authorship to your G+ account and your site.
3. Add a header link to your page
This is the final step to make Google recognize you as the author of a page, and display your headshot by the search results.
The header link should be added to your HTML <head> section in this format:
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/111879430098741117584" />
The 21-digit number after https
://plus.google.com/ is your Google+ account ID. You can find it on the address bar of your browser when you are on your own Google+ profile page.
You don't want to add this header link to all your pages. You want to be selective by adding it only to pages you want your G+ profile associated with. This often means only on pages that feature a useful article you personally wrote.
For example, I'll be adding the header link to this very page you're looking at right now.
APG vNext v4.4 - Easy Authorship Integration Built-in
Of course, since APG vNext 4.4 supports Google Authorship natively,
you don't have to manually add the link to any page. To begin using Authorship for your account, do the following:
- Add your Google+ profile link to your forum user profile (i.e. https://plus.google.com/111879430098741117584 for me)
- In the AdminCP, enable Authorship for your account
- Repeat this process for other members you want to attribute Authorship to. They could be other contributing authors in your organization.
All blog posts you wrote will now have the appropriate header link inserted. Once Google indexes your blog posts, it will show your headshot beside your search results.
In addition, you can also
pick certain forums to enable Authorship attribution. For example, I'll be enabling it for the Knowledge Base forum so that all KB articles I wrote will have Authorship attributed to me, because not all KB topics are currently featured on
my Blog.
Do I really want Authorship for my community?
Definitely. Google is taking Authorship very seriously. It is relatively new (2011) and because of the relatively complex process involved,
not many people are using it yet.
This is a great opportunity for you to begin differentiating yourself on Google in a very visible way.
And for practical SEO reasons, as far as I can see, this actually has a big impact on Google search results. The click through rate rises too when you have your headshot shown by the results (understandably).
There is almost no reason not to use this feature, so at the bare minimum enable it for the account you use to write posts with.
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