How I claimed my blog’s Google authorship and its benefits

Have you ever wondered how some search results in Google show the faces of the author on them? It is called Google authorship. This is to show that you are the claimed author of the post and I want to share with you how I claimed my blog’s Google authorship in this blog post.

If you make a Google search for “ZTE Grand X – The Smartphone Gamers Dream”, Google will return the results for the query with one of the results showing my photo, name and Google+ information etc on one of the search results.

Now let’s see how I claimed my Google authorship. I am assuming you have already set up your Google+ profile. Note your Google+ profile picture will be used as your Google authorship photo, so ensure you uploaded a Google+ profile picture showing clearly an image of your face.

What is Google authorship?

Google authorship is simply a means of laying claim to your original contents online using your Google Plus account. This method will require you to verify ownership of the web page using the Google authorship markup and rel-author tag.

How to claim your blog’s Google authorship:

To claim your blog’s Google authorship the first thing to do is to tell Google which page in your blog is your author page in my case it is my ‘about’ page. Once you’ve decided which page you want to use as your author page, you connect it with your Google plus personal profile page. So let me show you in simple terms how I did all these.

Step 1: Login to your Google+ profile and click on ‘Edit Profile’. Scroll down to ‘Contributor to” and fill in the ‘Label’ and ‘URL’ field as appropriate. See image below for reference. Then make sure it is public and click the ‘Save’ button and ‘Done editing’ button.

Step 2: Login to your WordPress dashboard, and click on ‘appearances’, then choose which menu your about page appears in. Click on ‘Screen Options’ at the top right hand corner of the page to reveal other options, tick the ‘Link Relationship’ check box option.

After that you can click on the Screen options to close the drop down, then click on the arrow pointing down next to the ‘Page’ on the ‘About’ menu option and type in author on the on the ‘Link Relationship’ field added and save menu.

Step 3: Still on your WordPress dashboard, go to ‘Pages’ and click ‘edit’ under your about page. Simply add your Google Plus profile anywhere in the page. My Google personal profile public URL for my About page looks like this:

https://plus.google.com/117674932352621401004/about

So I am going to add it anywhere on the page. <a href=”GOOGLE PLUS PROFILE URL” rel=”author”>+GOOGLE PROFILE NAME</a>. Add this link in the HTML interface of your about page. Remember to replace the link with your Google+ about URL and the Google name with your Google Plus name exactly as it appears on Google Plus. Then update your ‘About Page’.

Step 4: Go to your Google Webmasters tool, type in the URL of any of your blog’s post and click ‘Preview’. If you followed the instructions well, your result will be displayed alongside your Google+ profile picture. If you encounter any error, Google will display the type of error and how to fix it for you.

Note: If you are running a multi-author blog like mine because I accept guest posts from other authors, ensure to create an author page for each author and link each author’s bio by adding their Google Plus profile URL in their author’s bio.

Step 5: Another way of claiming your blog’s Google authorship is by email, simply visit this page and enter your email address and click sign up for authorship and a verification email will be sent to the provided email address. Click on the link in the email to add your email to your Google Profile.

What are the benefits of claiming your blog’s Google authorship?

Now that is the question you may be asking, wondering if there are any benefits to claiming your blog’s Google authorship? I am going to explain the few reasons why you should claim your blog’s Google authorship and why you should claim it now. First I will like to say that Google authorship does not lead to any significant factor in SEO but I am telling you that Google will give you some extra love when you claim your blog’s Google authorship.

When you visit a blog whose authorship has been claimed via search engine and maybe after staying on the page for awhile and hit the back button back to the search results you will notice that Google has added three (3) extra links from the author to the earlier result. Google will recommend 3 more links to the visitor all because they trust you as a result of your verified authorship.

Another benefit is claiming your contents first before the thieves that steal your blog content do. Google authorship will be your claim to all your blog posts, so when someone steals your content, Google will easily know you published it first and this may reduce your double content offense.

Must Read: Why bloggers should choose Google Plus as their social network

I hope I have given you enough reasons to claim your blog’s Google authorship immediately. Follow the detailed instructions above to claim your authorship today. If you have any questions or comments, please use the comment form below. Remember to share this post using the social share buttons and please subscribe to my RSS feeds for more interesting posts like this one.