Avatar in Google Search Results
In attempting to get this working with my various sites I quickly discovered that WordPress is stripping all of the REL= language from any Author field. In other words, you go into your USERS area and try and enter rel=”author” along with a link in one of the Author Bio areas, but WordPress leaves the link and removes the “REL=” part.
Now, it does this to try and protect you from users entering malicious code in their bio area. But if you have a blog where you implicitly trust all of your authors you might want to enable the ability for them to put in a link to their Google+ profile. For this reason I’m releasing a very simple plugin that will “fix the glitch”.
Allow REL= and HTML in Author Bios WordPress Plugin Download
You can download and manually install the plugin from the following link. Just drop it in your WordPress plugins directory and activate it:
Feel free to let me know if you encounter issues, but it should work with just about every version of WordPress still out there.
Have fun linking your Google Profiles to your search results! I can’t wait till there is widespread adoption of this as it will really assist with deciding whose link to follow!
EDIT: What to Do After Installing the Plugin
Since there have been a lot of questions about what you need to do after installing the plugin I’ll try and explain a little more of the process.
First, you need to go into your WORDPRESS ==> USERS area and edit your users Biographical Info areas to include a link to their Google profile. So, for example mine says:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/109938202835872364257/posts" rel="author">John's Google Profile</a>
Next, you need to go to your Google profile page and make sure that it has a link back to the domain that you are linking from. This ensures that the reference is circular. You claim to be that person… and that person claims to be writing on this blog.
Finally, you need to wait until Google enables this functionality for your site. It is in very, very, very limited release currently. I don’t know when it will be enabled for everyone, but if you aren’t seeing it yet I’d recommend leaving it and just waiting.
Hope that helps! And by the way, feel free to Circle me on Google+!
Nice plugin by Google plus is still in beta and not open to all.
You can have a Google profile even if you’re not in Google+ yet.
Google has just released +1 button, which is now available for everyone and you can add it easily using a small fragment of JavaScript code on your site. Like twitter tweet button Facebookkato button, this is an additional button that uses recommendations from friends and contacts in your Google search results more skilled, coming Google.
Thanks for the plugin info.
Can you help with the rel=me code that’s needed on my author page?
Google doesn’t make sense of it for me and I don’t have any ‘ologies’
This is the example they give but I just can’t relate it to my Google profile url which doesn’t have all those numbers in it……and what’s with the image src???…should that be a path to my image or a path to the G+ image?…..I’m going ga ga.
Would appreciate any help.
Peter
Peter,
The link you need to use is simply a link to your entire Google profile page. So, for example mine says:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/109938202835872364257/posts" rel="author">John's Google Profile</a>Hope that helps.
John P.
Great initiative. So essentially I just paste my google profile in the biography space?
I, too, want to know this. I installed the plugin, but what are the next steps. Thanks.
Also, what does this mean for the biography section? What will it show when it displays the profile from now on?
I installed and activated the plugin but I don’t see my picture in google when I search my url.
Jean,
Even if you install it correctly, you need to wait until Google enables this feature for everyone. So don’t uninstall it, but it may take a while before it shows up for you.
Cheers,
John P.
Hi – I’ve followed your instructions carefully but when I checked in webmaster tools I’m still getting the following error “Error: Author profile page does not have a rel=me link to a Google Profile” Webmaster rich snippet tools ( http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets) allows you to check even if author has not been enabled for your site yet.
Working now.Hurray!
The code for the author bio page needs to me rel=”me” NOT rel=”author” and there needs to be a link to the author page in your google profile links section.
Hi John,
installed the plugin, added the coding into the bio…but when i tried to verify using
google.com/wemasters/tool/richsnippets it mentions author profile page does nit have a rel=me link to a google profile
i’ve also changed it to rel=”me” as per the last comment but the same issue.
in my google plus profile, i’ve added the website about us and the home page
any thoughts?
jason
Hi John. I’ve also installed the plugins. But, I don’t understand how to successfully do it (enable google profile appear in google SERP). is there any other wp plugins to enable it easier? I don’t know much about script anyway.