Google Authorship WordPress tutorial

Google Authorship is a Google initiative to connect authors with their content on the web and verify authenticity – it’s a way of identifying genuine content creators. This article covers the steps to add Google Authorship to your WordPress website, including  Headway Theme instructions..

 How to Set up your website for Google Authorship

I found a helpful article at steamfeed.com
The step by step instructions I used after reading this article are listed below the following quotation from the above website:

If you haven’t heard yet, Google is looking for new ways to authenticate quality links. People are doing a lot more social sharing and a lot less backlinking these days. One way Google has decided to sort through the garbage to find the gems on the internet is through their Google Authorship program. So if you’re interested in getting ranked higher on search results and stand out among the millions then it’s time to let Google know who wrote all that great content.

Although you can use a WordPress plugin for this, you may prefer not to add yet another plugin so here’s how I did it:

Name and email verification

1. Ensure you have an email address that is on the same domain as the content, for example email bob@wiredintotheweb.com where the blog or website url is wiredintotheweb.com
2. Make sure that the post author’s name appears consistently on all posts. For example “by Bob Smith” or “Author’s name: Bob Smith” (set in WordPress settings).
3. Visit the Google Authorship Page and follow the instructions for setting up a Google+ account if you don’t already have one. Make sure your Google+ name (eg. Bob Smith) matches the WordPress author name (by Bob Smith) as in step 2. Enter the email from step 1 in the box and submit.

Set up Google Authorship by linking your content to your Google+ profile

Step 1: (Non Headway Theme option)

Create a link somewhere on your website using the following tag:

<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>
NB: Replace profile_url with your Google+ profile url
for example: https://plus.google.com/u/0/109580995898899217797/posts/

Step 1: (Headway Theme option)

This tip is by courtesy of Corey Freeman from Headway 101:

 Navigate to the “options” page in Headway from the WordPress dashboard, and paste the following code into “Header Scripts,” under “Scripts/Analytics.” Be sure to change the URL to your own Google+ profile. Otherwise, you’ll be giving me your authorship!

From the WordPress dashboard go to Headway > Options > Scripts/Analytics and paste in the following code:

<link rel=”author” href=”Your Google Profile url“/>
Where Your Google Profile url is something like:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/109580995898899217797/posts/

To find out more about Headway see our 2 part Headway video tutorials.

Remaining steps:

1. In your Google+ account edit your profile and add your website as a site that you contribute to.
   
2. Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that it all works. Just enter the url of one of your articles from your site and you should see something similar to the image below:
3. Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that it all works. Just enter the url of one of your articles from your site and you should see something similar to the image below:
   

Bit of a haul – but we made it in the end and I suspect well worth the effort in terms of SEO. I used the Headway option as I’m running the Headway theme and everything worked as you can see from the above screenshot. Good luck with setting your own site up.

For more information on WordPress Web Development take a look at our Wired Into the Web blog, plus you can download the FREE ‘Taking WordPress Mobile’ eBook when you sign up for the FREE email Inbox Magazine to let you know when new videos and articles are published to the blog.