Our Google Authorship plugin – Google Author Link has been very popular, now nearing 40,000 downloads on the WordPress Plugin Repository.
When supporting the plugin we commonly have questions about testing the authorship setup, the main tool that we refer people to is Google’s own Rich Snippet Test tool.Β Once people have that working though it’s up to the Google system to show or not show the authorship details within its search result pages.
I recently asked about this in the Google Authorship Community on Google+ to get some other ideas as to why some people’s authorship shows up right away and for others it does not. I had a very helpful response back from Mark Traphagen who’s one of the community moderators.
Mark says…
See this post: http://www.virante.org/blog/2013/10/24/matt-cutts-pubcon-2013-authorship-authority-future-search/
At this conference Matt Cutts of Google announced they would be cutting back on the amount of authorship results shown in search by about 15%. He said in testing that when they made that reduction “quality went up significantly.”
We don’t know exactly what he meant by that, but suspect that those who are getting cut could be any of the following:
1. People violating any of the guidelines in the official FAQ http://bit.ly/1i6OEG1
2. People posting mostly on low quality or spammy websites.
3. People who have not yet built up much authority (whether link authority or social signals) to their content.
Again, all of the above is speculative; we’ve had no definitive word from Google on any of this.
cellurl says
cant get authorship plugin to work. How much to fix it for me?
Peter says
Hi there.
Lodge a ticket in our support section. If it’s simple we may be able to tell you what you need to do.
Otherwise, if you’d like us to login an configure the whole thing for you, please purchase a Priority Support ticket.
Please visit https://helpforwp.com/forum/ for both of these.
Peter
Ginger says
Hey there,
I was wondering if I could get some clarification. If our site utilizes multiple authors and contributors is this still a good plugin to use? How do we ensure every post is attributed to the correct author? Do we need to create an About page for our authors to set this up?
Thanks for your help!
Peter says
Hello Ginger,
If you’re using multiple authors and they each have their own WordPress account, each user then puts their Google + details in.
When they create a page or post the plugin will credit that page or post to them.
Hope that helps!
Rahul Mehta says
Authorship gone π What ways should I attempt to get the authorship back?
Peter says
Rahul,
Did you check using Google’s rich snippet tool that it says all is ok?
Rahul Mehta says
Hi,
The rich snippet tool is showing my image. You can check I have added my site in the website box in the comment.
Only my name is showing in Google not the image!
Peter says
Rahul
I’ve seen that happen, not sure how Google determines when to show the full image + name or just the name…
Rahul Mehta says
Hi Peter,
Few days back my friend told me that your image is appearing in the search engine. But when I checked myself in Google only name was there. So I am assuming as you said it sometime shows the image and sometime the name only.
Peter says
Hi Rahul.
It’s really up to Google.
I have had many reports like this, it’s on then it’s not…
As long as your site checks our with the Rich Snippet Tickets tool the plugin is working, it’s then up to Google π
John Hollywood says
Hi, Paul,
First – thanks for the great plug-in…wow! OK I have a simple question. I have verified a few of my blog URLs in the Rich Snippet tool and they all show they are fine with my pic and Google Author verified. I don’t need to do anything else now except wait and see if Google shows my pic and snippet of the article when people use Google Web Searches? Is it really that simple? lol
John
PS I know it is up to Google to decide if they will show my face and author info
Peter says
Hi John,
You are spot on correct!
Best of luck π
Peter