No this title wasn’t a pun. It’s dead serious. My buddy Arjan discovered yesterday that Google is now allowing rel=”author” markup through a <link> element in the head of your site. This makes adding rel=”author” to your site properly a lot easier, and allows me to add it to my WordPress SEO plugin.
The rel=”author” link element
So the element should look like this:
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/115369062315673853712/posts"/>
Where the Google+ link should link to your Google+ profile. It’s really that simple. I reached out to Google to get confirmation that this would work and would keep working and they confirmed. So making author highlights work is now a three step process:
Getting author highlights
It’s a simple three step process:
- Add the above link to the <head> of the URLs you’d like your face to appear on.
- On your Google+ profile, you need to make sure to have a link pointing back to the site you want the author highlight to work on.
- Make sure your +1′s are public on your Google+ profile or it won’t work.
Once you’ve done the above, use the rich snippet testing tool to confirm it works.
rel=”author” in my WordPress SEO plugin
This already works in the development version of my WordPress SEO plugin, you can download that from the developers page. That version has a bucket load of improvements and some new features, so you might want to test that anyway, it’ll probably be released early next week.
If you’re looking for it in the development version, there are two spots: on each users profile page there’s a new Google+ contact method:
When a user fills this out, the link will automatically be added to each post or page he/she publishes. On the “new” Title’s & Meta’s settings page under SEO, you’ll find a drop down which allows you to choose which author should be shown on the frontpage:
That’s it. Let me know whether this works for you!
Push rel=”author” through your head is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
