Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
I’ve been using Google Authorship on my sites for a long time now.
I kept thinking about how cool the Authorship markup was, until I found out it wasn’t even working. For most single author sites, setting up Google Authorship is damn easy. You’d have to be an idiot to make a mistake with it.
It’s as basic as linking to your G+ profile from your site and vice versa. Not rocket-science, but when it came to setting up Google Authorship for a multiple author blog like this one, I found out its a little more complex.
If you don’t setup G Authorship for your multiple author blog properly, either no authorship markup will work at all or the main author of the blog will show in the search results for every author’s content.
Not good.
Setting Up Google Authorship For Single Author Blogs
Setting up authorship for a single author blog is extremely basic. There are various plugins you can install (some of which don’t work), you can connect your site via email; but the easiest way is to hard code the link pointing to your Google+ profile into your site’s header.
Simply login to WordPress admin, locate the ‘Editor’ under appearances and open the page. You should now see a list of pages you can edit, click ‘Header’:
You need to place an HTML link to your Google+ profile directly above or underneath the opening tag.
Place the following code into the header (replacing the URL with your own G+ profile URL): <link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/1112863725232080636/>
After pasting the code into the header, click update and it will be saved. Now all you have left to do is go into your Google+ profile, edit your about page and add a link to your site under ‘Contributor to’. That’s it.
Google will then verify your site with your Google+ profile and authorship will be setup. The problem is, if you have guest authors posting on your site; your face will still be displayed next to their content in the search engines.
Setting Up Google Authorship For Multiple Author Blogs
A simple way of setting up Authorship for all authors is to create a custom author page for every author on your blog. On the author pages link to their respective Google+ profiles and display all of their blog posts.
On top of that; make sure to include an author bio box below their blog posts with another link to their Google+ profiles. If you’d like a more straight forward way of doing this, checkout:
Google Authorship For Multiple Authors
This easy to use plugin adds a ‘Google Plus Profile URL’ field to every user profile page on your blog. Your authors can then login and add their own Google+ profile URL to this field and hit save.
Once done they’ll also need to add a link back to your blog’s home page from their Google+ ‘Contributors To’ link list. After setting this up, Google Authorship should be fully functional throughout your blog. The plugin will link to each author’s G+ profile page from their blog posts only.
Why Bother?
We’re moving into a new era of SEO, where the author is actually important. Google will eventually rank pieces of content based on who published it; or at least factor it into their ranking process.
This means if you have any high profile guest authors publishing on your blog who have a reputation in your niche; their guest post should theoretically jump up the rankings higher than your other posts.
It also allows your authors to gain credibility and recognition. If you read this post on Author Rank, you’ll learn that Google Plus profiles are like portable Page Rank hubs.
Each Google Plus profile has an ‘authority score’ and carries weight like a domain carries Page Rank. The higher this score (author rank); the higher the user’s content will rank whenever they publish content on a site. Their own site or as a guest on someone else’s.
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David Wood
Comments
Oliver Smith, April 20, 2013, 08:00
David, your guide on setting up Google Authorship for multiple author blogs is very helpful. I’ve always struggled with authorship markup, but your detailed steps make it seem straightforward. Thanks for sharing such valuable information!
Emma Johnson, April 20, 2013, 09:15
Great article, David! Your explanation of how to set up Google Authorship for single and multiple author blogs is clear and easy to follow. I’ll definitely be implementing these tips on my own blog. Thanks for the insights!
William Brown, April 20, 2013, 10:30
Thank you for the practical advice on Google Authorship, David. The step-by-step instructions for both single and multiple author blogs are very useful. Your insights into the importance of authorship in SEO are enlightening. Keep up the great work!
Ava Williams, April 20, 2013, 11:45
David, your article on Google Authorship is spot on. The detailed guide on setting it up for multiple author blogs is exactly what I needed. The plugin recommendation is a great tip too. This is a must-read for any blogger!
James Davis, April 20, 2013, 13:00
Wow, David! Your comprehensive guide on Google Authorship is fantastic. The focus on setting it up for multiple authors and the benefits of doing so are very insightful. Your practical tips are exactly what I needed. Thanks for sharing your expertise!
Isabella Martinez, April 20, 2013, 14:15
David, your detailed post on Google Authorship is incredibly helpful. I love your straightforward advice on what works and what doesn’t. Your tips on setting it up for multiple authors are invaluable. Thank you for the comprehensive guide!
Henry Taylor, April 20, 2013, 15:30
Your article on Google Authorship is a goldmine of information, David. The emphasis on proper setup for multiple author blogs and the importance of authorship in SEO resonates with me. Your experience and strategies provide a clear path to implementing authorship. Thanks for the detailed breakdown!
Sophia Garcia, April 20, 2013, 16:45
David, your comprehensive guide to Google Authorship is inspiring. The practical steps and strategies you shared, especially about setting it up for multiple authors, are something I’ll definitely be implementing. Thank you for the valuable insights!
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What strikes me reading this now is the piece assumes Google’s ranking signals are basically permanent infrastructure you should architect your whole blog around. Chasing whatever a platform currently rewards, rather than building something worth reading regardless of the algorithm, is the pattern worth naming here, not the HTML specifics.
Fine, the technical steps are accurate for the time. But the entire premise, that Google will ‘eventually rank content based on who published it,’ is stated as inevitability rather than prediction. Look, predictions dressed as inevitabilities are how an entire industry spent years hardcoding links into headers for a feature that quietly went away.
The best case against Marla’s read: even if this specific feature didn’t survive, the instinct behind it, that author identity would eventually matter to ranking, wasn’t crazy, and versions of it did show up later in different forms. I don’t think that fully rescues the post’s confidence, but ‘the specific mechanism died’ and ‘the underlying idea was wrong’ aren’t quite the same claim.
Marla, given that Author Rank never materialized the way this post expected, is any of the actual advice here, the custom author pages, the bio boxes, still worth doing for reasons that have nothing to do with search ranking?
I wasn’t in SEO specifically, so I’ll stay in my lane on the technical claims, but from the content strategy side of things during this era, I remember ‘Author Rank’ being treated as close to a certainty across a lot of blogs like this one, worth restructuring your entire header code around, worth training every guest author to set up a profile for. It never fully materialized the way this post expects it to, and the underlying feature itself was retired by Google a couple of years after this was written, markup and all. I don’t say that to mock the post, everyone writing about SEO in this period made some version of this bet. I say it because it’s a useful reminder of how confidently ‘the next big ranking factor’ gets predicted right before it quietly stops existing.
Ivy, that tracks with everything a marketing blog ever swore was about to change the game. By the time you’ve built it, the thing’s usually already dying.