How to Get Google’s Verified Authorship for your WordPress Blog
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.
Update (August 28, 2014): Google has announced that they’re killing Authorship, and search results will no longer show author names or photos.
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:
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.
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.
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.