hey guys,
ive been sitting there faffing around all day trying to get this Google Authorship to work. And i have finally had some success.
hopefully soon (within weeks) i should see my little google+ face next to some of my blog posts i have created on my site! :D and so will others. It is a bit of a vanity thing i think really, but its cool and i like this kind of stuff. If you want a presence online then having your face next to content on google is awesome, and if you can blog on your ning site and people see your face next to your blog then even better.
For anyone that doesnt know what I am going on about then see this link on Google Authorship
If you want to do this too, then just follow these steps. Make sure you do this exactly as i have said below. I will come back and reply if anyone else has difficulty.
Step 1. Create a Google+ profile. your gonna need one of these.
Step 2. Find out your id, or create a customisable URL instead. (both are the same thing)
Step 3. goto your ning network and edit your profile. http://yourningnetwork.com/profiles/settings/editProfileInfo
you need to add the following code into a text box on one of your profile questions.
<a href="https://plus.google.com/+YourGoogleProfileNumberOrID" rel="me">My Google+ Profile</a>
Make sure you have the rel="me", without going into detail.. this basically tells google this is your profile.
Step 4. Grab your ning profile link. You can simply just go to this link http://your domain.com/profiles and it will take you to your profile page.
example: http://YourDomain.com/profile/YourUserName
Grab this and place it in your "contributor to" section of your Google+ profile, make sure this too is a public link. You can add a label (basically anchor text) and the url.
Step 5. Make sure your name on your Google+ profile is the same as on your ning network!
If it isnt then you need to change your ning full name field to the same as your Google+.
You can add nicknames or "other names" on google+ but i havnt tested this with the authorship.
Step 6. getting there! keep going... Next step is to ensure you have an email address for your ning network something@yourdomain.com I had almost given up finding a solution for this, which there is basically no information on then i stumbled across something!
http://ningnames.com/help-center/faq-email-forwarding.aspx
(if you dont use ning names then look for email forwarding on your hosting area)
You need to follow exactly what this says. I basically made my email exactly the same as my gmail, but i dont think is neccessary as long as you can confirm anyemailaddress@YourDomain.com you should be fine.
I just filled in the bottom box which says, basically forward everything to this email address (i made this my gmail address). this also means if someone replies to a no-reply email you send then you will receive it too. cool!
Step 7. Then you need to goto this page from google so you can verify your domain email address, so click the link and type in YourName@YourDomain.com, you should then get an email to your personal account (as ning names now forwards any email to this account) and you can verify this link. Nice!
This will add an email address to your 'work' contact area of your google+ account.
The final thing i hadnt done was realise that i needed to make this email address a publicly available address so that the google bots could find it when i ran the check. The test was coming back as negative even though there was a valid email there until i did this. I just saved you literally 3 hours of faffing around there.
To change this necessary setting just goto your google+ profile>about and edit the contact information. You have to make this work email Public. It will be on Your Circles by default i think.
Final Step! If you then run the test, by going to this page and typing in a blog post url you have written, you will be able to see probably a failed test at this stage.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Then.. you can type in your google+ url into the box below. I have screenshot this box, and it should show you whether there is a connection there or not.
Fingers crossed i have done enough to start seeing my face on google search results for future posts. Maybe i am missing a step? I will soon find out.
I hope this has made sense. Believe me it gets complicated in your mind if you think too much about it.
Any questions? I will attempt to answer over this weekend.
Good luck. (you may need it to make sense of my post :D)
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Hey guys - i have an update! Woo-hoo today i received this email and it is good news. Authorship is complete! :D
Good luck to you all and i hope you can use this guide to pull it off too, so sorry it is so long winded :(
Replies
I'm saving this discussion for certain. Have wanted to do this but never got around to it. Thank your for sharing the steps! You'll have to let us know (down the road) how it feels when you wake up and see your face on the web. How funny will that be. lol
i havnt seen it live yet, but hopefully it will place my face against a post i have done soon :)
nice post.. nice walkthrough...crossing fingers for you..
all working, see post i have updated :-)
:(
I wasted 10 hours doing what you suggested to the last pixel.
No luck.
Also, I believe that your site is also not getting recognized now?
Check - http://gearsofwarportal.com/forum/topics/how-to-build-a-successful-...
on the webmasters snippet?
Thanks.. Any update will be appreciated
sorry to hear you have wasted all that time :-(
It can take a few days for it to work so dont dispair and have another look in a few days?
The reason you are not seeing it on that link anymore is because I ended up taking it off, as i preferred to be known as my user name rather than my full name on that platform, even if google didnt recognise me!
Also, i have decided to slowly move away from Ning and goto Wordpress.
I have started to set up a site, and you can get a premium theme that does things like Authorship, Reviews, that google search engines can see and understand. As wordpress is a collaborative tool there is so much expertise that goes into the premium plugins. This is a search for Authorship on Themeforest, which comes up with some good examples.
This plugin also ticks all the boxes for Rich Snippets and Authorship :)
oh... thank you SO MUCH!!!