For multiple author blogs you may want to show your icon or logo in the search results for your home page. We don’t yet know if this works – in that we haven’t seen it appear in the SERPs as yet – but based on Google’s documentation, the way to do this is using rel=publisher. If this is the case we are preparing for it by allowing the setup in AuthorSure.
Please note – your individual post pages (as opposed to the home page) still need to be identified with your personal profile photo. At this point in time there seems to be no way to have a logo show against individual posts. Of course this may change and we’ll update the plugin to reflect changes as and when they happen.
Prerequisites For Using rel=”publisher”
- you have set up a Google Plus Profile
- you have set up a Google Plus Page and set the “website” parameter to be the URL of your website
Steps In Setting Up The Menu Rel=Publisher Link
The Site Administrator selects AuthorSure on the Settings menu, and then:
- Enter the long number that is your Google Plus page ID into the rel=publisher section
- Tests the results by selecting going to your home page, and pasting its URL into the Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool
The following video tutorial steps through the process of setting up AuthorSure to show your company or product logo on Google’s search results for your home page.
The video is only accessible when you are logged in.
If you have not become a member you can sign up at FREE AuthorSure Membership.
Please login to access the video and the others in the series.
About Russell
Technologist, software engineer, internet marketer and WordPress plugin developer with experience in Finance, Telecoms and the Media.
Thanks for the training video which I have used to setup rel=”publisher” as i prefer my logo to show rather than my mugshot. Do you know if it takes any longer to get rel=”publisher” in SERPS compared to author. I notice slickrflickr.com logo is still not showing up in SERPS and I have not come across any such image in listings.
As far as we know you can’t have your logo show for posts – only for the home page. And yes – you are correct – we are also still waiting for the Slickr Flickr logo to show. They may not have rolled it out yet or maybe you need a huge authority in order for your logo to show. Who knows … we implement the right things and after that all we can do it wait.
OK, many thanks for your reply. I have put one site with author picture and another with site logo to see which shows up in SERPS.
Hi Eric,
Please let me know the results of your tests.
The Google rich snippets testing tool ‘preview’ of the results indicates that a logo could be displayed but we have yet to find an example of this working in practice in the real SERPs. I think Google has not yet decided when and how to roll out this functionality.
Same here, logo is appearing in rich snippets testing tool ‘preview’ but not in SERPs – will wait and see!
Same thing one year later.. Google Snippets preview is good.. Google results not.. No logo.. To be continued..
I had this working for two authors on one of my blogs. Suddenly, the rich snippets stopped working. I read your post and realized I didn’t have the ‘website’ parameter set to the right site. That seems to have worked! So thanks for the assist.
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Dear Russel,
Thank you for this plugin. I am sure I’ve goofed trying to set it up. I watched the tutorials and probably have it partly right. My post today from my blog shows my author image. However my site itself shows no author ship.
My site is http://panicfreeme.com
When I did the rich snippets testing tool, this is the error message I got:
“Author profile page does not have an authorship link to a Google Profile”
Here is my Google + page I created: https://plus.google.com/u/0/107861576845454970119/posts
I am confused with profiles and pages and hoping you can help. I probably added to this because I added my gmail account as an author for my blog because I assumed I would need this to use this plugin. Maybe that is part of the reason for the error?
I don’t know how to link my JillG author page to my Google Profile. If you showed that I apologize. Can you point me in the right direction?
Thank you so much!
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Hi Jill,
A couple of suggestions for you…
1. Go into WordPress then click on “Your Profile” in the Users section, then add your Google Profile URL. (not the page URL)
2. On AuthorSure settings, in the rel=”publisher” section, add your Google Page ID – 107861576845454970119
Thank you, that worked like a charm! I hadn’t done #1. Love this plug in!
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Jill, Glad it is working for you. Please give AuthorSure a great star rating at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/authorsure/. Thanks, Russell
I was wondering if there was a way to do this…
1) I have authors that write articles on my site but i don’t want a bunch of random authors using their google image in the search results. I want to still have them as the author, but with my google plus image/account next to the “search result” in google. Ideas?
2) For a different site I want my business to be the author. Anyway I can have my Google + business profile image/logo show in google results instead of using a Personal Google + account?
THANK YOU!
Not really. The image says you are the author so if you want to do this, it is best just to leave them out altogether and pretend you wrote the article.
At the current time, this is not possible for posts, but I believe it could be for your home page and possibly for archive pages.
Russell,
I just got my company logo to pull through in rich snippets. I am using the rel author tag though. couldn’t get the publisher one to work with a company page so I used a personal page with a company logo as the profile pic. Hope this helps!
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Nice one, Russell.
Your red logo is sort of “face-shaped” (with a bit of imagination). So maybe Google face recognition has some way to go..
Yes, there is something wacky going on for sure. Other users have told me they can’t see my results the same way it comes up on my screen so it leads me to believe that previous interaction with the website will give the user a rich snippet, but that’s unsure too.
There was lots of talk about rel=author at PubCon in Las Vegas today, no one has good answers, it’s all hearsay.
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Hi
This is super!
I was getting a bit frustrated until you said… It can take up to 6-8 weeks LOL
Thx mate!
Awesome thanks!
Does anyone have the rel=”publisher” tag working for a company logo yet? This is the right way to do it, but I haven’t seen any examples of it being used in the SERPS by Google atm.
I have only seen the logo turn up in the Google Rich Snippets Test Tool – I have not seen it in the SERPs – it is not clear what Google plans are for rel=publisher
Alright, thanks Russell!
I started tinkering around with my company logo in the serps it did actually show up, then dissapeared, then showed up again! Anyway I changed it to a profile pic just to be on the safe side. Im still not sure if I have all my settings right
Your setup is just fine – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=leejonesbuildingandroofing.co.uk&html=
And your logo appears in the SERPs, https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Roofers+%26+Builders+in+Nottingham+%26+Derby+%7C+Tel+07778+280485&oq=Roofers+%26+Builders+in+Nottingham+%26+Derby+%7C+Tel+07778+280485&aqs=chrome.0.57j62l2.386&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
well it looked nice while it lasted, I changed it to my company logo before my first post as a test again but they are all gone this morning. oh well. Hope Google manage to sort that one out soon!
Heres a nice pic of my authorship company logo
looks really nice in the results too 
http://pinterest.com/pin/299700550172714688/
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rel=publisher is not meant to result in your Google+ page profile picture showing in SERPs as the author pic. The author pics are always associated with individual Google+ profile, not pages. You may see the odd example author pics that are not faces showing up in SERPs (like this one) https://plus.google.com/u/0/107418054739711167675/posts/jM6KMM42ZDe, but this will be short lived. It’s been speculated that Google’s acquisition of Ukrainian facial recognition firm Viewdle is being used to detect inappropriate author pics. You may get it to work in the Rich Snippets Testing Tool, but it’s not going to work live in the SERPs – at least not for long.
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Hi Steve,
Thanks for your comments
There was a period that lasted for over a year up to around 4 months ago when the Rich Snippets Test Tool consistently showed the Google+ page image in the preview listing, not as the author pic, but as the publisher pic. This only applied to the home page when we had a rel=publisher link and no rel=author link. However, the Rich Snippets Test Tool is no longer showing the publisher pic in the preview. We have never actually seen this replicated in the real SERPs.
The odd non-face does turn up in the SERPs but, like you, I suspect these are just inappropriate author pics connected to Google+ profiles and not legitimate logos attached to Google+ pages.
AuthorSure is very much in line with Google’s guidelines: a real face for your Google+ profile, and a logo for your Google+ page. It is not clear how Google will decide to use the publisher logos in the future, if at all. However, I do not see any downside with using rel=publisher.
For example, our AuthorSure plugin has it own Google+ page, and we perform support discussion on that page. It is reasonable to assume that the social activity on the Google+ page may be considered in Google’s ranking of the connected authorsure.com site.
Too bad they don´t allow logos on authorship. And even worse that they are not clear about that either.
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