How to Display Author Information in Google Search Results

Authorship markup is no longer supported in Google Search.

Google has been working on improving the user experience and productivity for their Google Search users. As they still dominate the Web Search, it's compulsory to stay competitive and embrace more users. Anyway, now Google integrating their social platform with their products / services and Google Search has gone to a whole new level with this integration. If I cut to the chase, Google Authorship is here.

Google Authorship

Google Authorship is a way to compliment the authors who generates awesome content online and those faces hidden under the web pages are now getting more exposure via Google Search. Now that's a fabulous promotion opportunity for authors and their content. With authorship in play, Google searchers can even dig into other content that has been published by the same author without going over to his blog, website or online profile. Sounds awesome. Isn't it? Indeed!

If you are an author who publishes content online and would love if other users can discover your contributions via Google Search, the authorship markup is for you. It doesn't matter if it's your blog or someone else's site, wherever you contributed online will get the attribution once you had this markup implemented. Further, users can discover your Google+ profile and add to their circle within few seconds to follow your upcoming updates too.

Keep in Mind

In order to make it work, Google needs some settings in order to verify you as the real author behind the content. You can easily implement this feature on your blog and / or authored sites, and rest is assured under the Google's wings. Then Google fetch and index the connections and start to show off your Google+ profile picture and details along with the relevant search results. Here's a preview for you to get a clear picture.

Anyway, it takes some time for Google to verify your identity and connection between authored content. Hence, you can't get it working immediately but Google is pretty quick if you consider the number of web pages online. However, Google offers you a testing tool, so you can verify if everything is in order. Therefore, nothing to worry about after all.

Would love to get some Google love and attribution where necessary? Let's get the authorship markup set up for your blog / website now.

Before You Go:

* Authors need a Google profile prior to show authorship information in Google search results. If you or contributors have no Google profile, create a new Google profile before proceed with steps below.

* Instead of adding code snippets, you can set up authorship just by using a verified email address too. Read Easily Enable Authorship Information for Your Content on Google Search Results.

Steps:

1. Update Google profiles of all authors who has been contributing to your site by adding site URL to their Contributor to section.

How to Add a Contributing Site Link to the Google Profile

a. Go to Google profile.

b. Navigate to About tab.

c. Find Links section, and click corresponding Edit link.

d. Now click Add custom link.

e. Enter site name as Label and URL of site in respective fields.

f. Click Save button.

2. Now you just need to link your site content to respective author profiles. Either you can link them directly to their Google profiles or via author profile page. Select relevant category and follow respective instructions from below.

Note: If you are a Blogger user, you don't need to follow this step. Instead, integrate your Google+ profile and continue to last step.

Link Directly to Google Profile

i. Add below link to every content page after the author content or appropriate place with relevant information.

<a href="[Google Profile URL of Author]?rel=author">[Content]</a>

Or else you can add below link tag to the head section of every content page that you wanna show author information on search results.

<link href="[Google Profile URL of Author]" rel="author"/>

Link via Author Profile Page

i. Add below link to every content page after the author content or appropriate place with relevant information.

<a rel="author" href="[Respective Author Page URL]">[Content]</a>

Or else you can add below link tag to the head section of every content page that you wanna show author information on search results.

<link href="[Respective Author Page URL]" rel="author"/>

ii. Now add below link to every author profile page which belongs to authors who contributed to your site.

<a rel="me" href="[Google Profile URL of Author]">[Content]</a>

Or add below link tag to the head section of your author page.

<link href="[Google Profile URL of Author]" rel="me"/>

Color Indication Information:

   - Your Google Profile URL

Add you Google profile URL here. If you don't know your Google profile URL, navigate to your Google profile and grab the URL displayed on browser address bar.

   - Your Author Page URL

Add URL of respective author's profile page which has the information of author, created on your site or on another site.

   - Content

Content means it could be some text, image or it would be better if it refers to the author, such as author name, author profile picture.

For example:

<a href="https://plus.google.com/110895337863776656534?rel=author">Mayura De Silva</a>

3. Now you can use the Structured Data Testing Tool to find out the author data that Google can extract from a specific page. It can be your site, one of your content page or author page and you can see if they are linking each other correctly.

Enjoy :-)