It appears that I’ve managed to get my authorship working, but just not on this site. I presume this is because Google are essentially trying to push their product, Google Plus. Unfortunately this is not what I was expecting, but nonetheless I’ll still take it. I posted yesterday on Twitter that I’d be looking into implementing authorship on two of my sites.
Just setup Google Authorship on two of my sites — should have done that a while ago. Will be fun to see my face in the SERPs. #GooglePlus
— Jonathan Jones (@Jonny_J_) December 20, 2013
I’ve done this by verifying my websites using emails that are connected to the domains I own to verify my authorship status. I’ve also added a much more suitable picture as I’ve read that Google are quite stringent on the types of pictures you can use. You obviously can’t use pictures of cats, dogs or anything else other than a human face; otherwise, that would give you the benefit of higher click-through rates (CTR). This is obviously something Google are against, and you should only really be having rich snippets on listings that you’ve actually written yourself.
It’s quite unfortunate as I did already have Google Plus authorship setup (also known as “rich snippets”) — I believe in that occurrence, however, I didn’t have an image uploaded that Google would be willing to accept. It was a side shot of my head. From Google’s own words:
- “Make sure that you have a profile photo with a recognisable headshot”
Otherwise, you’ll find that your mug might not ever appear in the results. You’ll likely get the following issue where your only your Google Plus account will be linked to with no image in sight.
See “by Jonathan Jones“. (Only text; boo!)
Where Google+ was given preference over my own site
And, this is the part where Google+ was given preference over my own website. I actually don’t really think this to be the case, and would moreover conclude that this is due to Google+ being crawled then indexed quicker than my site.
I’ve heard it could take a minimum of a week to start seeing my lovely face in the search results — after implementing the rel=”author”, adding your site to G+ and verifying your website using the same domain as your content (not necessary).
Why does Google’s Authorship for Google Plus matter?
According to a case study by Catalyst Search Marketing, click-through rates (CTR) increased by 150% when the authorship image showed up on their listings. It’s also quite obvious that if you have an image next to a bunch of text – that you’ll be likely to read that piece of text when compared to non-rich snippet search listings. A good example would be comparing the images above. The result with my face next to the text will likely be clicked on more than the first image — it’s just logical.
I’ll be sure to post an update when I start seeing my mug in the Google search results pages. I’ve also been working on using Schema.org on my other site to test video rich snippets and to see how to actually implement that. I’ll be sure to post about that too, once I get it working.
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