How to add Google Authorship to a single author WordPress Blog

Google Authorship is a great new way to boost your online presence by associating your Google+ profile with any web content that you create, so that Google automatically displays your Google+ profile next to any of your content listed in search results. It can help you to attract new followers, and help people to easily find other content that you have produced. Google have also added new “Author Stats” to their Webmaster Tools so that authors can easily see how often their own content is being discovered in Google search results.

This post gives simple instructions on how to add Google Authorship to a WordPress Blog produced by a single author. It assumes that you are using a WordPress Theme that supports WordPress “Menus”, and that you have a menu link to an “About” page about the Blog’s main author.

  1.  Create a Google+ profile that you want to associate with the WordPress Blog in question.
  2. If you don’t already have one, register a suitable email address with the same domain name as the WordPress Blog. Note – it is still possible to associate content from a domain that you don’t have an email address for, but that is not covered by this post.
  3. Activate Google Authorship using your email address with the same domain name as your Blog.
  4. Install the AuthorSure WordPress plugin in your WordPress Blog.
  5. Follow the AuthorSure instructions for configuring a single author Blog.
  6. Ensure that you have added your Google+ profile URL to your WordPress user account profile, since this is where AuthorSure gets the Google+ profile URL from when it automatically inserts the link below every post. When logged in to your WordPress Blog as the admin user, hover over the top-right menu and click on “Edit My Profile”. At the bottom of that profile page in the “Contact Info” section you will find a space for your “Google Plus Profile URL”.
  7. Use the Google Webmaster Structured Data Testing Tool to check if your Blog has been correctly configured for Google Authorship. Paste in an example URL for a post on your Blog to see if it correctly detects your Authorship data.
  8. If this test fails, or you have any other issues, please refer to the Google Authorship help page and double check everything.

In general, it seems to take between several days and several months for your Google+ profile to start appearing next to Google search results for your content, so don’t expect immediate results.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Tri Wahyudi (crypton97.us)

    All sorts of ways so that the warning message “Automatically detected on the webpage author name: Not Found” This always fails 🙁

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