Google+, Personas, Authorship, Verification, Rankings
Personas, pen names, pseudonyms, or whatever you might call them, have been a topic debated by webmasters for quite some time. Here at SEO Revolution, we are proponents of using personas on a regular basis.
Why should you use personas? In order for Google to properly credit you as the author of the content you wrote instead of a pesky scraper who routinely steals your content, personas are what you need. But it goes beyond just proper credit, because the picture of the author shows in the SERPs, it also has been proven to increase click throughs as well, which is exactly what you want. Even a listing at #9 sees more clicks than many of the sites positioned above. This is a great competitive advantage.
But you shouldn’t have just one persona. You need multiple personas. In other words, many authors. We like to have at least four. Here’s why:
- AuthorRank is coming. Eric Schmidt said results with authors will rank higher than those without. The days of anonymity will begin to come to an end online.
- If one account gets shut down for being fake, you have backups ready to go.
- It’s still fairly easy to get these set up and verified without much trouble.
- Minimizing footprints. If G+ starts analyzing spammers based on their author profiles and they are stupid enough to place all their sites in one profile, this will certainly end up bad.
- Test CTR with different profile pictures.
- To build circles faster.
Still Need a Reason?
Let me explain further. The authority which will be passed isn’t “link authority” or “site authority”; it will be hard to fake author rank if you don’t start now. The word AUTHORity should be a hint as to how important authorship is. Every day we have to fight the Google Zoo (Panda and Penguin), and the goal here is to claim all of your content as your own. If you have been hit by either Panda or Penguin, you know the issue of having your content assigned to another site, which is so frustrating. After all, you wrote the content but someone else is getting the credit for it. When content is associated to a persona in Google+, you are less likely to have issues with content scrappers out ranking your content. This is great protection for you and your business. You want to tie every piece of content on your site to a persona.
Why?
Google has given publishers a way to protect themselves from content scrappers and plagiarizers. To get this started there is a connection you need to create between your site and Google+. Doing so will allow your SERPs results to look like this and get more click throughs as a picture of the author show and draws more eyeballs:
G+ Setup
Let’s begin here with setting up the Google+ Profile.
- Create a Google+ profile for you persona by going here. You will need a good picture for the profile. It is recommended to use a high quality headshot. We have even heard about pictures being too low quality to be displayed in results. Cartoons don’t seem to work either. Get a real face, and do it the right way.
- Add the websites you are contributing to by editing your G+ profile.
- Click on “Profile” located on the right side bar. Then “Edit Profile”
- Once your in edit mode scroll down to the section titled “Contributor to”. In here you will add a link to your author archive. For example: http://www.domain.com/author/your_name
WordPress installation
Many WordPress themes now include the correct biography boxes and setup to get authorship configured. The Genesis framework is preferred and we will use it as our example.
In WordPress go to > “Users” > “Add New” or edit an existing user.
Box 1 is where you link to the post page of your G+ wall. The url will end in /posts. Box 2 is your bio. It is important to put your name as the anchor text in the bio just as you have it on G+. This anchor text should point back to the same URL you used in box 1. Make sure to include rel=”author” in the HTML anchor. See the example below.
<a href="http://plus.google.com/u/0/234234523452/posts" rel="author">John Doe</a> is dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla faucibus neque quis nibh rhoncus feugiat. Fusce ullamcorper nunc quis leo iaculis feugiat. Aliquam semper interdum elementum. Vivamus sit amet nisl sed nisi interdum convallis. Aenean sit amet augue eu tortor sodales posuere ac congue magna. Aenean laoreet nulla ac enim varius auctor. Phasellus feugiat euismod libero, aliquet tempor ante viverra sed.
Now, you will notice in large blogs that these pages will often point to their personal pages on the site, which then link to G+. Don’t take the risk, we had hit and miss success with this.
Verification
Welcome the Rich Snippet Tool, which may be more important than the W3C verification now. This tool will validate your authorship as well as display microdata information on the page. The best part is that you get a glimpse of how your site will look in the SERPs.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
*** Please do not forget the G+ profile Picture ***
A new change to this process is the authorship verification by email. To do this you will need an email address at all the domains where you are the author. You will find this box on the Rich Snippet Tool after you test your authorship.
Changing Authors in WordPress
If you followed our instructions to set up multiple users as authors in WordPress, you will want an easy way to assign articles to each user without having to log into each one individually to make changes. Make sure to scroll to the top of your post, and look to the top right corner where it says “Screen Options” and click the checkbox author. No need to download plugins for that one.
The rel=author tag will automatically be added properly with Yoast’s WordPress SEO which we have been recommending for over a year now.
Setting up multiple accounts will be a headache as you run out of phone numbers to verify, especially if you go the lengths of creating a Twitter profile for each user, and a publisher page.
Publisher
Creating a publisher page is rather straightforward after you have a normal user for Google+ created. Go to this URL: https://plus.google.com/pages/create
Get started. We have been testing various types of settings like local business, brand, company, and other. There is no clear winner yet, but we like to think in terms of creating a brand. Remember that once you create the publisher page, it takes a couple weeks to transfer ownership to another account, so pick one you know you will remember and have frequent access to without giving away a huge footprint.
Implementing the publisher tag in WordPress is simple when using WordPress SEO by Yoast. Navigate to the Titles & Metas section, click on the “Home” tab and you will see the place to drop in your Google+ page URL. We typically do not apply authorship in the form of a person to the homepage.
This should lock your content down to some degree from getting hijacked while boosting CTR. This is RCS. Just like the paid pretty actors on commercials, you now have free pretty personas on your sites.