Everyone is talking about how search is going social. Google +1 buttons are now integrated into websites, search results, and even Google Ads. Well, all of that is important, but now we're seeing an increase in Verified Authorship for Google search results.
Update (Aug 28, 2014):Google has announced that they are killing Authorship, and search results will no longer display author names or photos.
Finally, with the new redesign, we have also added it in WPBeginner. Now when you search our articles, you will see the image of our founder Syed Balkhi in the results, like in the screenshot below:
We hear people claiming that this is increasing click-through rates and sometimes rankings as well. In this article, we will show you how you can get Google verified authorship for your WordPress blog.
You need to add the following code in your theme section. (Don't forget to change the Google+ profile URL to your own.) You can usually do this by editing the header.php file
If you are using a theme framework or just want to put this as a function then you can add it by hooking it up to wp_head(). Paste the following code into your theme functions.php file.
add_action ('wp_head', 'add_google_rel_author'); función add_google_rel_author () echo ''; The next thing you need to do is go to your Google+ profile and add a link to your website in the contributors section.
Lastly, make sure your +1's are public on your Google+ profile or this won't work.
Now that you're done. Just wait for Google to crawl your pages again and show your face next to it. You can check if you did everything right by going to the Google Webmasters Rich Snippets test tool. Below is a screenshot of what it should look like.
This trick would work great for sites with individual authors. If you're running a multi-author blog, then you'd have to be a bit more resourceful. You can add an additional user profile field for Google+. Then run a conditional statement in the header area to see who the author is and display the corresponding URL. Yoast WordPress SEO plugin now includes this feature in the latest version.