The first of the four ways of identifying the author of the post and linking it with rel=”author” to the author page is to use the byline of the post which typically appears in the headline immediately beneath the title.
Many themes will do this automatically so there is nothing for AuthorSure to do on posts and pages.
All AuthorSure needs to do is add the Google+ profile (and any other profiles) to the Author page.
An Example of Post With a Byline
The author name is a link to the author page
.
An Example of an Author Page
AuthorSure will typically add 4 things to the author page:
- A title: the author name.
- An author bio
- A subheading to the list of profiles
- A list of URLs to the author profile
.
When To Use Author Byline
This author byline method is appropriate when:
- you have more than one author on your site;
- your WordPress theme provides rel=”author” links in the post byline
- you want a fairly discreet acknowledgement of the author of the post
How To Set Up Your Profiles
The available profiles appear on the “Your Profile” and “Edit User” admin pages.
The profiles are Facebook, Flickr, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. Just fill the URLs of the the profiles you want to appear on the author page.
It looks like this:
.
About Russell
Technologist, software engineer, internet marketer and WordPress plugin developer with experience in Finance, Telecoms and the Media.
Ah, that’s all very well, but what precisely do you put in the Skype entry? Hmm? Putting your Skype name in there just gets you a URL which looks like this… http://www.yourdomain.tld/skype.name ~ and when you try and use it the worlds “chocolate” and “fireguard” spring immediately to mind.
Hi Terence,
Thanks for your comments. Yes, the Skype stuff is not right. The clickable skype link should be of the form: skype:russelljamieson?call. There will be a new release later today so I have still time to improve this feature.
See http://www.authorsure.com/622/skype-call-button-on-the-author-page
Regards
Russell
Well, that WAS quick. Skype works perfectly now. But although I can get author boxes on every post, I still cannot get http://www.socialstrategy.co.uk/author/Terence to do anything other than take me back to my home page.
And now for some reason today, Google can’t find my thumbnail
Terence.
terence.milbourn recently posted..Social Strategy – The Medium Is The Message
Terence, When you say “Google can’t find my thumbnail” are you talking about the Rich Snippets Testing Tool?
Since yesterday it stopped showing thumbnails for everyone, even Matt Cutts’s blog – see http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?view=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattcutts.com%2Fblog%2F
Got another question for you. Why is it whenever I click on my name, say http://www.socialstrategy.co.uk/author/Terence I am always taken right back to the home page and never to the rel=”author” http://www.socialstrategy.co.uk/about.html page?
Hi Terence, The redirect of http://www.socialstrategy.co.uk/author/Terence is NOT to do with AuthorSure. It is either your WordPress theme, another plugin or you .htaccess file that is causing this unwanted redirect to the home page to take place.
Quick question: Why do you use CommentLuv and then no-follow the links it produces? The “Follow My Links” plugin works quite well in this respect, well at least it does on my theme (U-Design).
Terence.
terence.milbourn recently posted..Social Strategy – The Medium Is The Message
Terence, We are using CommentLuv Premium “out of the box” with no special settings. My partner Lizzy choose CommentLuv so will be able to give you an answer of why it links the way it does.
Women!… 8^)
Only kidding Lizzy.
I don’t know what extra Commentluv Pro does, in detail, but I understand it has some bells and whistles as far as do-following links are concerned. But that’s not the main problem here. This is a standard WordPress issue. For some reason they decided to no-follow comment author link and turn typed in-comment links into URL as standard. Which is hard on you SEO-wise and also hard on those folk who paid good money to provide CommentLuv in order to attract more comments.
Terence.
terence.milbourn recently posted..Optimise Your Website To Get Found
Terence – the no-follows on this site within comments are nothing to do with the WordPress decision to default one way or another. CommentLuv gives you the choice to have do follow or no follow comments.
Liz recently posted..Free Graphics Resources For Your Website
And Google now decides whether to follow or not follow, based on what they think and not what we want, so where does that leave us with CommentLuv I wonder ~ exactly where we were before. A mix of do follow and no follow links. Exactly what Google is looking for and rewards.
However, I don’t think it makes much sense to try and encourage posters with the promise of link love and then not give it to them. That way it will reward regular posters, if you allow them the link juice, but it won’t encourage more activity which is, I imagine, on the agenda.
Just my 2c. YMMV.
Terence recently posted..Social Strategy – The Medium Is The Message
Thanks for your 2c. The way I have set up CommentLuv will discourage human spammers. There is nowhere I am aware that I have promised dofollow link love. My use of CommentLuv gives commenters the ability to have a link back to their last post (or a choice of posts if you are a CommentLuv+ user or a regular poster), that does not require them to somehow work it into the comment. If people value a comment they will check the comment author out via the convenient and prominent CommentLuv post link.
When I contribute a comment to a site that happens to run CommentLuv I don’t check if the links are do-follow or not. I really don’t care either way and I’m not sure why you do. The only way to get back links that make any kind of difference is to produce link bait or content people value.
@Russell ~ If you’re running a one author blog, the author archive will always look exactly the same as your homepage. And even though you may not link to it, others might, and do you harm by winning you some duplicate content brownie points. So I have disabled them and avoided any link to those archives which are now 301 redirected to the blog homepage.
My questions are these:
1) Is this causing me a problem with author identification?
2) Has everyone else’s pictures stopped showing up at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets since the last update?
and
3) When I see these warnings using the Google rich snippets tool, how do I fix them?
Extracted Author/Publisher for this page
author
linked author profile = http://www.socialstrategy.co.uk/about.html
google profile = http://profiles.google.com/112060638726676865017/about
Verified: Authorship markup is verified for this page. Learn more.
author
linked author profile = http://www.socialstrategy.co.uk/author/Terence
Extracted rich snippet data from the page
hreview-aggregate
item fn = Social Strategy – The Medium Is The Message
rating
best = 5
average (normalized to 5.0 scale) = 5.0
average = 5.00 / 5
count =
votes = 2
hfeed
hentry
Rel
name = View all posts in Social Strategy
rel = tag
url = http://www.socialstrategy.co.uk/category/social-strategy
Warning: Missing required field “entry-title”.
Warning: Missing required field “updated”.
Warning: Missing required hCard “author”.
Terence recently posted..Social Marketing versus SEO
Hi Terence,
That’s a meaty comment. Let me take each item in turn,
Single Author Blog
There are several better approaches to potential duplicate content than a 301 redirect. Using a link rel=”canonical” would have been a better approach. However, I would suggest you consider using the “menu” method for AuthorSure rather than the author box – this would allow you to have your existing “About” page as your author page without using any redirects, cannonical URLs or risking duplicate content – see http://www.authorsure.com/49/setting-up-authorsure-for-single-author-blogs.
To answer your questions
1) Is this causing me a problem with author identification?
Yes. Try the “menu” method or at least remove the 301 redirect and use the rel=canonical link instead.
2) Has everyone else’s pictures stopped showing up on the Rich Snippets Tools?
Yes, since some time on April 11th the preview stopped showing.
Google’s algorithm that decides whether or not to show your face now seems to depend on the search term. So if your page is about “Green Widgets” and Google gives you authority on Green widgets and then search term is “Green widgets” then it will show your face. However, if the search term was “blue widgets” and Google does not give you authority for blue widgets then your entry on the SERPs will show up but maybe minus your face. The Google Rich Snippets Test Tool does not allow you to enter a search term so the preview returns the message “The excerpt from the page will show up here. The reason we can’t show text from your webpage is because the text depends on the query the user types”. This is clearly a bug in the Google Rich Snippets Test Tool. Google will need to add a field to the form so you can enter the search term. This will allow you to ask the question: “Will the page show my face for this search term?”
3) When I see these warnings using the Google rich snippets tool, how do I fix them?
You can safely ignore these warnings, they are warning not errors.
Hey Russell, many thanks for the full reply and dealing with all my issues.
The 301 redirect instead of rel=canonical is put there by the WP SEO plugin by Yoast, so I was figuring, all things being equal, Joost probably knew best. And anyway, rel=canonical wasn’t an option.
1) That is how I have the site set up ~ as a single author site. Always has been from day one since finding your most excellent plugin.
2) OK, I thought something was broken at my end.
3) OK, but what is the reason for those warnings and is to do with the theme or your plugin?
Again, many thanks,
Terence.
Terence recently posted..Social Strategy – The Medium Is The Message
Hi Terence,
301 Redirects are preferred over rel=canonical in the general case – see http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content, so Yoast is unsurprisingly correct on this
However, in your specific case, the redirecting of the author page makes it incompatible with using the author box which relies the author page operating as a normal page.
As I stated earlier, my suggestion is to set the AuthorSure setting to “menu”, choose “Who Is This Guy” as your About Page and set Terence” at the primary author, then follow the instructions in the tutorial to as rel=”author” to the menu link <a href=”http://www.socialstrategy.co.uk/who-is-this-guy.html”>Who Is This Guy?</a>
AuthorSure will then add the profile icons with the link back to Google at the foot of the Who Is This Guy? page.
Your site should then verify in the Rich Snippets Test Tool
Regards
Russell
Thanks Russell, that’s what I’ve done.
Terence recently posted..Social Marketing versus SEO
Hello,
I done configuring the program now I’m looking to submit my site/profile to Google but the Google submission form link isn’t working. Is there another link available for the form submission?
Google no longer require the Authorship Request form submission.
Hi Russell,
First of all thank you very much for writing this great plugin and your continuous support
Take a look at the following page please:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:hispantv.com&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ei=f2HxT8XWKar_4QTSyNjaDQ&ved=0CEUQ_AUoBA&biw=1366&bih=601
As you may see in this page, all the entries and posts are recognized as posted by a company (brand). Hispan TV has set up a fan page in Google+ and they have connected their page to Google Plus page. So Google always prints their name beside all the entries.
Of course this site has multiple news writers but if you click on one of their entries you can’t find any author box. How can I do the same using your plugin? Assume we have a big websites with many writers but we want to highlight entries as “Posted by Website” not as “Posted by Russell”
Thanks and Regards
That appears to be a Google News search result. I don’t see any such thing in ordinary search results.
Liz
Also can I use Google+ Page instead of Google+ Profile ?
At this time, no. Google wants the personal profile of each author. We have allowed a place in plugin for the Google Plus PAGE profile to be placed, but this is an attempt to future-proof the plugin and have your Google Plus page icon show up on the home page SERPS for your site, should they (Geoogle) ever decide they will allow this.
Thank’s for this (How To Set Up AuthorSure Using Post Bylines) great tutorial. I was having a hard time with those.
Hello,
I think my authorship has been verified correctly, thats what the rich snippet tool tells me.
I still have that missing required field warning message..
you said to ignore it but just annoying seeing it.
I’m hosted on blogger
Soki, Without your posting the URL I cannot see the problem. But if you use the “footnote” method then there is no warning as AuthorSure adds the missing ‘last updated’ information.
Not really sure what this has to do with us? Authorsure is a WordPress plugin.
You can ignore the warnings, but if they annoy you, you need to improve the code on your website so that it handles comments markup properly.
Hello,
I am trying to implement google reviews rich snippets. But It is not working.
When I trying structured data testing tool then it shows reviews and also shows this message “The excerpt from the page will show up here. The reason we can’t show text from your webpage is because the text depends on the query the user types”.
So could you please tell me what I have to do for implementing Google review Rich Snippets.
My skype id: engpiyush06
Thanks
Piyush Bansal recently posted..Get all images url from string
@piyush, this message is normal see https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.authorsure.com&html=. You can see my face alongside the same message. All Google is saying that the excerpt of text it displays for a page is based on the user query. Sometimes it will use the meta description; other times it will pick an excerpt from the page that is relevant to search phrase the user typed in. With the rich snippets test tool there is no search phrase.
The issue for your site is that your page is missing the authorship markup.
Hey, great article! One question, does this update posts you already have on your blog? Or do you have to go through and update the ‘bylines’ on all your old posts?
Thanks! ~Devani
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