Update September, 2014: Unfortunately Google Authorship has been discontinued by Google.
A recent thread on Website Babble about stolen content revealed that many people still aren’t taking advantage of Google Authorship.
No matter what you may think of Google’s dominance of the Internet, there is a big benefit to using their Authorship feature — especially while they still rule search.
As your site grows, it’s inevitable that at least one lazy person will grab a copy of your content and try to pass it off as their own.
The beauty of the authorship tag is that it links your content back to your name and website as soon as you create it.
Of course, this by no means stops people from stealing your work, but by the time the thief creates his/her copy of your article, the content will already be associated with you.
Here’s how to do it…
1. Create a Google Plus profile.
2. Add your websites to either the Contributor To or Links section of your profile.
3. In a common section of your website that appears on all pages (footer, header, sidebar, etc.) hyperlink your name using your Google Plus profile and the rel=”author” tag.
<a rel=”author” href=”http://plus.google.com/your_Google_Plus_ID”>Your Name</a>
A Nice Shortcut! Just recently I learned from the Yoast blog that it’s now even easier to use the authorship tag because you can add it to the <head> of your pages in your meta tags like this…
<link rel=”author” href=”http://plus.google.com/your_Google_Plus_ID”/>
Google confirmed this will work just as well as the original method.
To ensure you’ve done this correctly, check your site in the rich snippets tool. It may also take a few days for Google to sync everything up so be patient.
I should also mention there are a handful of WordPress plugins to help speed this process up as well. Just search for Google Authorship plugins to reveal them.
Linking Your Author Page to Google
Another way to prove to Google that you are the author of your content is to link all your content to your author/bio page and ensure your bio page is also in your Google Plus profile (under the Contributed To section).
Some argue this step is not really necessary, but it’s not going to hurt anything. There are a couple of ways to go about this, but here’s how I’ve done it on this blog.
1. I’ve added my About Me page to the Contributed To section on my Google Plus profile
2. My About Me page also has my name that is hyperlinked back to my Google Plus Profile
3. The About Lisa link, which is linked from every page on this site has the rel=”author” tag in the code
So if you were to view the source code on this blog, you will see that the code for my About Lisa link looks like this…
<a rel=”author” href=”https://blog.2createawebsite.com/about”>About Lisa</a>
How to Add the rel=”author” Code to Your Author Page Link
If you have an HTML site, it’s just a matter of adding rel=”author” inside the hyperlink code as shown above. But if you’re using WordPress it’s also pretty easy — especially if you’re using the menu feature.
Also, if you’re a Thesis user, Marko Saric has a great tutorial on how to setup this up. This is a good guide if you have your name in your byline of all your posts. It will automatically link it to your About Me page instead of the standard WordPress bio page.
Even if you don’t care to sync your author page with your Google Plus profile, at least add the authorship tag with your name to claim your content.
The Importance of Author Rank
Using Google Authorship markup will help you build up your Author Rank.
What is Author Rank?
It’s your individual online author reputation. So when you use Google Authorship to link your name to your content, the more that content gets shared via social media, the more it will positively impact your Google AuthorRank.
This metric will become extremely important with ranking websites in the future.
I knew the importance of google authorship a lot, but never checked this point of view. An image can help for getting betetr ctr via search engines, but never thought we can also look to claim our content, Awesome!
Hi Lisa thanks for this info, I recently had someone rip off my content and post it as their own, even with my name on it how rude..lol. I lost you there for awhile, I’m glad I found you again because your information is top notch.
Hey Craig,
Yeah I can relate… story of my life. And sometimes they are so careless they copy the AdSense code too. Which of course makes it easier to report to Google. LOL
Glad you found me again too! 🙂
hi lisa thanks for this post but i have tried it almost 4 to 5 times but still i am not able to do it correctly.will try again after reading this post
Hi Lisa,
Thanks for the tip, it will be fun/awkward to have my face on the google search results ^^ Also loved the “content thief” picture, good pick!
Thanks, I haven’t heard about Google Authorship until I’ve seen your post! That’s valuable info. I do use author tags but in a conventional manner, without linking.
As a newbie, i have no idea that anyone can easily steal your own content. Thanks for the excellent tips lisa.
Great lisa, article and contents plagiarism has been a big problem online, but i thought there is a plugin that also serve the same purpose on wordpress
can you advise us of this plugin?
I had no idea this was possible. I’ve been lucky enough to have written a number of viral articles in the past and the one thing that can dent the elation of achieving a Digg front page is the discovery that your hard work is now duplicated multiple times across the internet. Your post changes that, thank you.
This is great information here! Thanks a lot Lisa! I have a content before that is very extensive only to be copied by scrapers! Although a link back was provided, i prefer only excerpts to be taken.
Hi Lisa I have a hardly used google+ personal account (I much prefer facebook) is there a way I can alter it to represent my business?
Hi Lisa,
Thanks for the Google authorship info.
2 Questions:
1. Do you need an “about me” page to do the google authorship? I’m an SBIer working on Blockbuilder2 and I added the ref+author link below my footer. I went to Google + and followed your instructions on “contributor to and link” but I’m still not getting my photo next to content on google. Is it because I don’t have an “about me” page?
2. Do you have to put “www.” in front of the URL because I got this warning from the snippet tool:
Warning: based on data collected from your profile, you contribute to great-kids-birthday-parties.com while your website seems to be http://www.great-kids-birthday-parties.com.
Thanks Lisa 🙂
No, you don’t. You can just add your name to your site and link it to your Google Plus profile. That should be enough.
Have you setup a “preferred URL” in your Google Webmaster tools account. For example, the www version is my preferred URL so I always use the www and remain consistent. Try to use the same version everywhere (www or without) to prevent these messages.
This is very useful information but I always thought google was able to determine the original author by which site the content was indexed at first.
Great walkthrough on G+ authorship markup! I saw that you mentioned Yoast, but I highly recommend AJ Kohn’s posts on it as well.
Many people talk about G+ and they mock it, saying it will never be Facebook. What most don’t understand, is that these are the early days of your “authorship” following you around the Internet. G+ is not Facebook, it’s an entirely different entity.
– Tommy
Thank you Lisa, you are awesome. I have learned so much from you than any other place or website. Keep the great information coming.
Thanks!
Hey Lisa,
I used to use a plugin called ‘Blog Protector’ which stopped right clicks on my site – meaning it wasn’t easy to scrape or steal my content.
Then I was persuaded that this is just an inevitability of life on the internet and to use TYNT which tracks the content taken from your blog and adds a link back – so in theory you should get some SEO benefit from that (though I’m not entirely sure how it works and someone could always just erase that link).
I’ve seen after using TYNT that my content is copied quite frequently but I have come to not let it bother me anymore – if at least a small portion is giving me some ‘juice’ back then maybe that’s OK.
Combine this though with your advice above and I guess that’s the best solution.
So thanks very much for some very helpful advice. Have you tried either blog protector or TYNT? What do you think?
Hi Alan
I too have learned to accept that this is just part of web life, although it’s always great to find other tools that may deter it. So thanks for the tip about TYNT.
I’ve always been fascinated that people try to stop right-clicks and copying. As a programmer, I always knew how easy it was to circumvent this (and also the crazy ‘encryption’ scripts some people use). I surf the net with Firefox + NoScript, so am usually blissfully ignorant of attempts to stop right-clicking. If I end up using another browser to view the site and discover they are attempting to block it, I just smile and shake my head. The bottom line is, if you display something on the screen, it can be copied (think digital camera – think transcribing). If you are putting something into a public arena, it only makes sense that people will copy all or parts of it – if they find it useful. It could be seen as a compliment.
Not only that, but disabling the right click (which is essentially disabling javascript) can also keep other things from working properly. I learned that the hard way. lol But it sounds like he is not using that method anymore.
I used the AuthorSure WordPress Plugin to add the Google Authorship to my blog. I used the Rich Snippets Testing Tool in Google Webmaster Tools to test it. The tool shows my profile picture and says that the author is verified.
My profile picture does not yet show up in the serp, I guess I have to wait till Goggle passes my way again.
I have a question, if anyone knows if this will work only on new posts created, or will it show on posts that were created before the authorship tags were put in place?
Just an update. I have my Google Authorship profile working now. But it only works on new posts. I published a new post yesterday the shows shows up in the Google search results with my profile pic. My other pages dot not have my picture beside them. So I guess that this will not work for the past post, only the post you publish after Google Authorship is set up.
It works for all my old content prior to setting up Authorship. I wonder if it’s a temporary thing. I noticed my picture disappeared for awhile and then it came back. Could be a temporary issue.
Thank God! Finally! This was a great concern of mine! Thank you Lisa for pointing that out!I will defenatelly do that to my blog!
I feel Adding authorship doesn’t stop content stealing at all but I feel it as a Google Tactic to Improve Google Plus Program among the Bloggers.
Google Indexes all our posts & it knows which post was posted earlier & which one was posted later, so this itself gives google to find who is the ORIGINal writer.
I set this up a couple of months ago but I had no idea it could help me claim my articles before content thieves. 🙂
Can this be done without a Google Plus page? That whole thing is very confusing to me because some people prefer to keep their business and personal lives separated.
No, they force you to sign up with Google Plus but you don’t have to use it.
I have been using Google plus a while and did not know about this so thank you very much for the share it is very useful. Going to check out the plugin first see if I can make life easier 😉
Well this is something new to me lisa. Thanks god i am already using Google Authorship.
me too got Google authorship , it really improves the serp CTR
Thanks for this. I’ve updated my sites (even though one of them is still saying there’s no authorship linked from it).
I don’t know what Google will do about it. I suspect the smaller site will get penalised for having the duplicate article on it (even if the smaller site is yours – with your original content). Hopefully this won’t happen, but we’ll see. I mean, we all know that some people with great, original content have been slapped by Google before.
Lisa,
I feel Adding authorship doesn’t stop content stealing at all but I feel it as a Google Tactic to Improve Google Plus Program among the Bloggers.
Google Indexes all our posts & it knows which post was posted earlier & which one was posted later, so this itself gives google to find who is the ORIGINal writer.
But I feel everyone should signup for authorship as It adds more professionalism.
I agree it’s not going to stop theft as I said in the post, but it at least tags your name to content you create and associates it with Google first. Thanks for stopping by, Chris!
I was always about people stealing my content..I hope this wil solve my problem..thanx Lisa
Till now haven’t used many features you listed. One is of Googole Plus and i never thoughtof linking my google plus page with my name. Awesome!
Almost done!
Now I’ll learn how to connect it to my wordpress blog.
Thank you Lisa. It’s fun every time I read your blog.
It has been almost a week. My name is still not appearing in Google search: (
Thank you so much for this! I’m a freelance writer and a blogger, and I’m always looking for ways to protect my content. The trackback feature only goes so far, so this is really good to know.
Excellent tips. I wanted to do this but was not sure how it is done. Your posts has really helped me finding answers to my questions.
Your advise is always useful for me and i always love to read your post all the time.
Hey Lisa,
Thanks so much for this information. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while now because stolen content seems to be getting worse and worse. It’s always been a problem, but I keep coming across my own stuff getting ripped off more and more.
So here’s a scenario I was wondering about. What if you don’t claim your content with Google authorship, then someone steals it, and then they use Google authorship to claim it as theirs? Is that possible? Could this actually backfire on you by not using it or is Google smart enough to still know the original creator?
Also, is there any way to claim things like Ezinearticles? Those seem to get ripped off the most with people stealing the content, removing the backlinks, and not giving you the credit.
Hi Derek
I’m not sure what would happen in that scenario. The good thing is, I read about a Google update in 2011 where they claimed they are getting better at determining the original owner and it has to do with date the content is indexed/spidered. Now I don’t know if that will somehow discredit the person who is using the authorship tag or how Google will treat that.
And that’s the other thing. Other than having your picture displayed in Google results alongside your content, we still don’t know how much credit or discredit is assigned or how this really impacts SEO, our online profiles with Google, etc. This is all still pretty new and evolving.
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t worry about your first question too much. Most thieves aren’t going to go through all the trouble of doing that. Of course, some may, but most won’t.
I’m not sure you can prevent theft from EzineArticles and the like. People are lazy and will continue to take articles from these kinds of sites. This is where the point I mentioned above may come in handy with Google looking to see which content was indexed first.
There are still a lot of gray areas out there when it comes to this kind of stuff.
ive been wondering how theyre doing that, thanks for this liza, you’re really changing lives =)
Real great advice as usual Lisa. i did have it loaded onto my site already, but it is always good to double check the code.
Good add on for any website marketeer.
Steve
Thanks for shedding light on this Lisa, these kind of happen everyday. Always gems in every post, I don’t know how you do it.
Wow, that means a lot! Thank you.
Thanks for informing me about Google Authorship. Although I must admit, I’m not too worried about people stealing my content and claiming it as their own.
Great post Lisa because the topic of content stealing has been a central concern of mine lately. I have rewritten a major portion of my site pages because people have been stealing. Also, I published articles on other sites that content that was rehashed so I have rewritten those pages on my site as well. I have a profile with Google+ and appreciate the tip of adding my About Me page to my Contributor Section. Thanks for continuing to have our backs in this website business.
Hey Lisa,
I’m wondering if you have thoughts on co-authored documents (the scientific community is filled with them) and sites with user generated content. Google doesn’t seem to have a good way to deal with this. It’s all or nothing.
For example, let’s say you publish something to Hubpages. Should Hubpages take the credit? No, but if they template their site to include themselves as the author, you’re out of luck.
What about guest posts or user generated content on sites that are templated so that the head section or site-wide links are the same on every page. You don’t really want to take credit as “author” for a guest post published on your site.
That credit should go to the author of the post.
I realize that this is a tool for Google to use as a relevancy signal, but it seems like they’ve missed some big issues. Perhaps it will evolve, but I dunno.
Thoughts?
Great point, Kurt. You’re right. Because even if you add rel=”author” to your name, the page still has the authorship going to the site owner. And with all the guest posting going on today there should be a way to remedy it.
Any tips on how to fix that? My blog has several authors and this has caused me not to implement Google Authorship
Hi Dennis,
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1229920
About a third of the way down the page, there’s a section called “Multiple-author blogs and sites.”
I publish on HubPages and I have claimed Google authorship for them. It is not too difficult to do, although HubPages do not go out of their way to explain the method. You just have to link your profile on HubPages with your Google+ account.
It is even easier to do it with Squidoo lenses.
I also think there is probably a way to do that when you are guest posting on somebody else’s blog, you just link that particular post to your profile on your own blog. I haven’t tried this though. Not sure what can happen if people really collaborate on a post.
I don’t think this is so much of a problem with scientific papers. The authors on those are clearly stated on the journal site where the paper is cited, and on sites like pubmed and scopus. The copyright in scientific publications belongs to the journal rather than scientists, since scientific publishing is big business, people would be very foolish to try and steal that content!
Great article..Going to apply thsi on my website now.
This is a great Idea Lisa, and I am on to it straight away, let’s hope there is a simple plugin to do it for me.
Yes there is! Use AuthorSure it’s free. http://authorsure.com
Thanks Liza. I’ve finally signed up for Google Plus, and added the link to my page headers, as per the instructions from Yoast. I’ll see what the results are, over the coming weeks.
good post Lisa. just implemented this last week.
I know G is contemplating taking into account author profile into their SEO algorithms. it will be interesting to see how this plans out over time…
of course the theft issue is something else all together that you’ve brought up nicely in your post
i am waiting to see how other platforms such as ezinearticles make available means to link your authorship between all accounts rather than having disperate ones (similar to the Gravatar concept tied to your email ID)
Yeah, I’ve read that other search engines may also start recognizing those same tags so they will be universal and not just for Google. The more all the major players play along, the easier it will be for publishers to claim their content.
So what happens if you use Google Authorship and someone steals your work? What exactly does Google do about it?
As Google continues to get smarter what you hope will happen is that Google will disregard the content altogether but definitely rank it lower than yours (if at all).
The jury is still out on exactly how it will be handled, but one of the reasons this tag was created was to help content owners claim their content. It certainly can’t hurt right?
Thanks Lisa for this great post. After reading Mateo’s thread and all the responses, I have begun to get an idea of how great Google + is. I initially misunderstood its relevance as it was associated with privacy issues etc…but now, I’m beginning to take it seriously after its value has been well explained here.
i actually have done this Lisa, I hope it is working right but I did see my picture next to one of my results. This a great idea.
I’ve had Google Authorship for quite some time now and it’s been great.
I have my Google Authorship on my blog and also I didn’t know that it could help my blog when content stealers steal my content.
Thanks for the tips Lisa.
Hi Kharim,
It’s not as much about the benefit of your blog but it prevents thieves from gaining as much benefit because Google knows you created it first.
Great article posting lisa! This article will surely help me out and my friends. For WordPress users: this is the best plugin for Google authorship http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-author-link/
Thank you for this wonderful article
-Alex
Cool thanks for the recommendation.
Lisa,
The best thing about your web blog is that you don’t just TELL the people, you SHOW the people.
The only way I could sum up that approach is, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Hi Alex, on what basis do you recommend that plugin? I see a lot of plugins doing the same thing and they have a higher rating…
Lisa,
You always find the best stuff!
I wasn’t familiar with the author tag. Not that anyone has stolen my content (although some of my videos are starting to show up on other sites, but I don’t mind that).
Thanks again.
Anytime, Mitch! Great to see ya here.
Hi Lisa – that is a good clear article for people wanting to implement authorship themselves. Please also mention our free Authorship plugin that makes this easy for WordPress users. It’s called AuthorSure and works using the three way linking method (the first and the best method as it minimizes the links out of your site). The plugin can be found in the WordPress repository or at the plugin site : http://www.authorsure.com