How To Claim Authorship for your Personal Google+ Profile

by Radha Gopalakrishnan - 10/21/2013 10830 Views

Methods used in claiming authorship for your Google + page

Claiming authorship for your Google plus profile is very much essential as it is a sign of verification. Google plus authorship helps people ensure that the content or update being posted is by an individual and is tied to that person’s digital reputation through their Google+ account. Also a recent study has revealed that people are liable to click on a link containing a person’s photograph which is a sign of acknowledgement rather than click through a normal link containing some text alone. Google authorship adds credibility to your content and also drives more traffic towards your content or the site to which your profile is linked to.

Google Authorship

Linking your content to your G+ profile using verified email address

The following are the steps on how to claim authorship for your Google plus profile

Step 1

Create a personal Google plus profile for yourself.
If you have one already, then it would be good to proceed further.

Step 2

Now switch over to https://plus.google.com/authorship in order to establish authorship markup.
You will be taken to the following page

author markup page

Step 3

Now enter your email id(name@domain.com) in order to claim authorship verification
Once done, click on “Sign up for Authorship”

authorship signup

Step 4

Once you have signed up, a verification email will be sent to your email id and you will be notified as shown below.
If you don’t have any profile picture you can update one by clicking on “upload profile photo”. If you have already updated one, then skip this step.

email verification

Step 5

Login to your email to confirm authorship verification.
Once you are logged in, open the mail from Google . Then click on the “verify” to confirm your authorship verification.

verification confirmation

Once you have verified, you will be taken to the following window.

verified profile

If you want to customize your profile further, you can click on “edit your profile” or else you can skip that step.

Setting up authorship by linking your content to your Google plus profile

You can also link your content to your Google plus profile. Incase if you have multiple blogs, then you can follow the method suggested below

Step 1

Establish a link connecting your Google plus profile from your webpage with the help of “rel= author” tag.
This will look something like the following <a href= “https://plus.google.com/118321989430962111396?rel=author”>Google</a>

Step 2

Link back to your webpage from your Google plus profile as follows
Under the About tab of your profile, go to Contributor To section
There will be an option named Add custom link. Add your webpage name and url intimating that you have connected to your webpage from your Google plus profile.

profile customization

Once you have claimed authorship, your Google plus profile picture will automatically appear next to your posts in the search results.Structured data testing tool can help you find out the author data extracted by Google from your profile page.

An added advantage of this authorship is that you can track analytics for each of your posts via. Google authorship under Labs section of Google Webmaster Tools. This also includes posts that are not published in your website.

Thus claiming authorship for your Google plus profile can enhance your visibility in search results and improve your content’s credibility. Also your content’s ranking may boost up as Google is now seeking forward to rank contents based on author’s influence rather than prefer a blank content without authorship markup.

There are lots of other interesting features available in Google plus and to know more on how these features can benefit you, subscribe to our news channel and follow me on my Google plus profile

Category :

Social Media

Tags :

authorship verification, authorship markup

About Radha Gopalakrishnan

I work as a Business Analyst wherein I explore recent trends in SEO and get to know more about Digital Marketing .... more info about the author