WordPress PLUGIN: Enable REL= and Other HTML in Author’s Field (for Google+ and Google Search Listings)

Google is beginning to roll out the ability to have your Google Profile linked to search results. This is an awesome new feature that my friend Trey Ratcliff worked with them on setting up. Do a search for “HDR Tutorial” and you can see what I’m talking about.

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:

• Allow REL and HTML in Author Bios (WordPress Repository)

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+!

Tagged as: Blogging, Plugin, Tutorials, Wordpress