My presentation at Pubcon New Orleans, on April 25, 2013. Co-panelists were Marcus Tober, and Jim Boykin, moderated by Bill Hartzer.

1. Google+ and Author / Publisher Markup
Rob Garner
April 25, 2013

2. About Me
• Independent consultant focused on
strategic development
• VP of SEMPO
• Founding member of DFWSEM
Association, past president
• Longtime speaker at Pubcon – 7th year
• Member of WebmasterWorld since 2001
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3. Search and Social: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time
Content Marketing
• Covers interdependent
search and social
concepts
• Social signals on search
• Interview with Brett Tabke
and many others
• 406 pages
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4. Authorship Markup

5. Without content, search
engines, social networks,
and web sites do not exist
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6. Without authors and
publishers, quality
content does not exist
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7. How can search engines
measure the trust and
authority of content creators
across multiple publishing
entities?
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8. The Publisher Graph of the Internet
• Google has already created a
web graph to identify
publishers of content, and it
has been in use since the
beginning of the Google
search engine
• Marketers and publishers
have typically looked at
standard SEO metrics for
identifying qualitative and
quantitative attributes of
trusted publishers to return in
the search results pages
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9. The Author Graph
• Measures influence,
authority, and theme, just
the way Google measures
other digital assets
• Your influence is reflected
by the quality and theme
of the publications you
write for, and by the
relative social signals for
those properties
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10. Wanna know how Google+ Authorship works?
Use your SEO sensibilities
• People (authors) are nodes, just like websites are nodes
• Your author ID is a unique ID, just like a URL
• Connections between an author and content can be measured
just like connections between links
• Author and publisher content also has keyword inference,
themes and authority, just like links and websites
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11. For G+ Authors, Content Contribution is the New Link
• In the world of authorship markup, a
blog post or other content
contribution on a reputable publisher
site is like a link to your author
profile
• When Google recognizes your work
on another site, it has the potential
to carry the trust and weight of that
publisher toward the author profile,
even though there is not always a
direct link
• Content across varying entities
helps determine the author’s
authority, trust (as opposed to being
spam), and general content theme
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YOU
Publ 1 Publ 2
Publ 6
Publ 5 Publ 4
Publ 3

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16. Authorship: Connect the properties you write for in
your G+ Profile using Links
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17. But Google will connect both linked and scraped
resources to your profile
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SearchMarketingStandard.com
Not listed in my profile
Wiley.com
Not listed in my profile
SiteProNews.com
Not listed in my profile

18. Establish a link back from the publications you
write for
• Once you have linked to your publications in the Contributor To section of your
profile page, you must also create a link back from your profile pages on the
third party sites
• If you contribute to your own sites, this will be easier to complete because you
have more control to add this link yourself or have someone in your company
do it for you
• If you are publishing on sites that you do not own, you will need to have an
administrator place these links back to your profile.
• The link on the publishing site must include the rel=author attribute and link
back to your profile on Google+. Your profile link should look like this:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/2222221111112?rel=author">Google</a>
• Be patient, because it may take up to several weeks to start appearing in the
search results.
• You can also use the Google rich snippet tool to test your authorship markup,
but remember that proper implementation does not guarantee that your
markup will appear in the search results.
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20. Establishing Authorship with a Verified Email
Address
• A second method of verifying your connection between a
website and Google is with a verified email address.
• This email address should contain the domain of the site that
you publish on and that was submitted in the box on the
following URL: https://plus.google.com/authorship.
• Once your email address has been authenticated, Google will
add your address to the Work section of your profile. You can
then edit your profile to make it private or adjust the settings of
who should see your contact info.
• Make sure that all of your articles contain a byline with a brief
description of who you are and that each article you wrote is
preceded with “by.” Google looks for snippets of text that
contain the phrase “by+Author+Name” as a signal to reinforce
authorship.
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21. Establishing Authorship Using WordPress
Plug-ins
• There are a variety of different WordPress plug-ins to help you
quickly establish rel=author for your individual authors or blogs
with multiple authors. Here are two examples of plug-ins to
help get you going:
• Authorsure: This plug-in works for both single-author and
multiauthor WordPress blogs
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/authorsure/
• Google Authorship for Multiple Authors: This tool is
designed mainly for blogs with multiple authors, and its creator
states that it needs to be customized in order to work for
single-author blogs
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-authorship-for-multiple-writers/
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22. Publisher Markup

23. Publishers: Get a Google Badge
• Google Badge is a way to
connect your website directly to
your Google profile
• Google “strongly recommends”
that webmasters and publishers
make this connection.
• Google also refers to it as an
“enhanced version of the +1
button”
• In effect, it creates a sort of
handshake between your main
web asset and your Google+
presence and verifies your web
presence with Google as a
publisher
• Read more about Google
Badges at
https://developers.google.com/+/
plugins/badge/config.
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24. Publishers: Get a Google Badge
• Two other ways to confirm ownership of your site with Google:
1) Create a rel="publisher" link from the main page of your website to your
Google+ page. The link code follows:
<a rel="publisher" href="https://plus.google.com/YourGoogle+AcctURLHere">Find
us on Google+</a>
2) If you don’t want to put the link on your public-facing page, you can include the
following code in the head section of your main page:
<link rel="publisher" href="https://plus.google.com/[yourpageID]" />
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25. Thank you
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Rob Garner
rgarner1@gmail.com
214.676.2089
@robgarner