Google has recently announced implementation of authorship markup in search results. This change allows authors to take credit for their content. It also shows author pictures in the search results. These author profile pictures are generated from the rel=”author” tag in a hyperlink that points to the author’s Google Profile.
How this is going to benefit you?
Right now implementing this will help Google display your profile picture on the content you have written. This will give credibility to your blog, increase the user trust, and will also help Google improve their search.
- Increases credibility of you as an expert in your niche.
- Increased trust level.
- Better page rankings.
As I mentioned earlier in my blog posts (here and here) that Google is now paying more attention to gauge a page’s importance using social matrices. The author tag enables search engines to find out more about an author and their credibility in a respective field. This tag will enable search engines to understand:
- Who you are.
- What are the topics you write about.
- Who likes your posts.
- How people interact with your content.
- People who interact with your content, what do they like.
How to add:
Step 1. Basically rel=author is just a hyperlink, which links to author’s Google profile. Like this:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/108579361730459688657" rel="author">Noumaan Yaqoob</a>
If you own a single author blog you can put this link anywhere on your pages.
Step 2. It was that easy to give yourself credit for a good blog post. There are people who might use this feature for writing poor content and give credit to other people. To avoid this, The Google profile page should also have a link back to your main domain.
There is more on how you can add this markup to your blogs with multiple authors. Check out this post on how to add it to a WordPress blog for multiple authors. Also check out this article on Webmaster Tools help pages.
Also watch this Webmaster’s Tools video in which Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson discuss authorship markup.
@Yasir Imran Mirza: yes on every page. You can add this in the sidebar, at the bottom of the page, header, footer, anywhere. Yes it can be added to a widget too this way it will appear on each page.
If a person on blogspot, he has to add this link to every post ?
If on wordpress, he has to post it in all posts?
Or he can put this code into any widget of wordpres blog or blogspot blog?