Google Plus Authorship: What’s The Point?

The second social networking task on my list after starting to grow a Twitter following was to add Google+ authorship to this site. These days, you can’t Google anything without seeing a bunch of chirpy faces in the results and research suggests that SERP CTR is vastly improved in some niches just by these little thumbnails. Sometimes, anyone dipping their toe into blackhat SEO waters might be reluctant to get onboard with a Google product, since they pretty much know everything about you, but since I decided to use Analytics and Webmaster Tools on this site, what’s a little authorship between friends?

Setting up Google+ authorship will take you about 30 seconds (instructions here). Afterwards, give it a test with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and you should see something like this:

google-plus-authoriship-snippet

In a similar way to my Twitter growth campaign, I’m now beginning to network on Google+. Instead of using software, this time I’m opting for the power of Google. I perform a search for topics that relate to this blog and my interests (i.e. “seo news”, “building niche domains”, “making money online”). All results with authorship enabled will have a link to the authors Google+ page (and the number of followers). Click the link to view their profile, and add them to your list.

google-authorship-result

So now I begin the Google Plus challenge to grow my following and increase SERP click-through. To begin with, I will share my posts, other interesting articles and work on adding relevant people to my circles.

More updates on the way soon.

June 19th 2014

  • Following 0
  • Followers 0
  • Views 0