Google Author Link: a new WordPress plugin

Many of the plugins that we create are to solve problem for our clients, so while building WordPress websites we always keep an eye on ideas to help us and to help other WordPress users.

Google has been trialling a system, Google Authorship,  where they link a profile on Google Plus to the web sites that a user contributes to. They also require the website in question to link back to the Google Plus profile.

So today, we’ve released a WordPress plugin that quickly and easily allows you to hook up your website with your Google Plus profile.

There is a lot of chatter around the internet about the SEO benefits of content that is linked with Google Authorship, so there’s some more reading on that topic, suffice to say it will probably help your rankings in the search engine.

What does it look like?

Take a look at the screen shot here, when your web site is shown up in Google search results your profile will be displayed link this.

How to setup the plugin

So here’s a quick step by step guide on how to set this up.

Download the plugin.

Go to your Google Plus profile and edit the profile, ensure that you add your web site to the section “Contributor”. This tells Google that you’re an author for the particular site.

Then configure the plugin, basically editing your user profile in WordPress to add your Google Plus Profile URL.

Then take one of your URLs from your site and paste into Google’s Rich snippet tool, all being well that should confirm that your setup is correct.