The How of Google Author Verification-Part 3 - Publishing Solo

Google Author Verification–The Gold of the World Wild Web

Google Author Verification: The Gold of the World Wild West!

Google Author Verification is protection for your online gold, your content. Do you know that black hat spammers wrestle other’s content and use it to rank on Google? You thought www stands for the World Wide Web, but in my mind, www stands for the virtual WORLD WILD WEST! Your content is GOLD and you need to protect it . This is part 3 of Getting Google Author Verification, the steps of how to get protection for your golden content in the World Wild West of virtual real estate.

Before we take Step 1, you might wonder why I am telling you how to do this, when Google is likely has the instructions available on the web. I tried those instructions. They were confusing, ambiguous, and incomplete. If you would like to try their way, here is the link to Google’s explanation how to get Google Author Verification (good luck).

For those still with me, the laymen class, following are seven steps that will practically guarantee that you’ll get Google Author Verification status. I have done this for my authors now, seven in a row, and it has worked like a charm immediately. This was not true or myself. I did 3 all-nighters reading Google Instructions and others’ take on this process over and over again. I finally got it!

I put together a series of steps that has worked really well. Google doesn’t say you have to take all these steps, but I strongly recommend it, because it works. If you skip one or more steps you might have to do some all-nighters to figure it out, like I did!

Step 1: OPEN A GOOGLE PLUS ACCOUNT

Go to www.plus.google.com and open a Google Plus Account. You’ll need a Gmail address to do this if you don’t already have one. I know, I know, not another social (networking) obligation, you are thinking. I hear ya. However, if you only have one social media account, choose Google Plus. (I get no kickback or ad money from Google for writing this)

Step 2: VERIFY E-MAIL ADDRESS

The best way to help Google Plus connect the dots is to verify your e-mail address. The very best email address to verify is an email address that is associated with the domain where you have most of your articles published. This is not absolutely necessary, but important and will make the process go faster if you verify an email address.

Ready, Set, Go!

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Step 3: WRITE & PUBLISH AUTHOR BIO

Write a short author biography such as one you would write for the back of a book. Include a profile photo and publish the bio to the page which publishes articles written by you. This is a key step in helping Google to connect the dots that you are a writer for this particular site. If you are a guest author on a site that you do not control, be sure that as a part of the agreement for providing them your original content, that they in return publish your author bio on their site. Include a photo, and suggest to their webmaster that they include your author name in the alt text area of the photo. This is great for the people who run the site, because if they have a Google Verified Author writing for them, it can increase their website authority and search engine rankings.

Step 4: GOOGLE AUTHOR = REL CODE

In this step we start to connect the dots for Google. Basically, Google wants to know that you are the original author of the material written. To help them be clear that this is the case you will need to place a link in your byline in articles you have written AND in the author bio area. Now this is fairly easy to do, if you know how to create a hyperlink. If you do not know how to create a hyperlink, learn how or get a web-geek type to do it. This is where it gets crazy with the Google Instructions. They tell you to place this “rel-author” code on the page, but they neglect to say where! The code looks like this below. The number is your profile number which can be found in the address bar in your Google Plus account. Substitute your Google Plus account number for my number; and then hyperlink your author name (by so and so) in each article you write to your Google Plus Profile. Test click on your author byline in your articles to be sure your byline is going to your Google Plus Profile.

https://plus.google.com/100623472600373724870?rel=author

Step 5: AUTHOR BIOS

Go to all of your author bios or profiles and insert the above link into your name. I suggest if you are an Amazon Author that you go to Amazon Author Central and create your author profile. Goodreads.com has a high ranking on Google, so I would suggest setting up an Author Profile there was well. Put your rel=author code as a hyperlink into your name. Spell your name the same way everywhere as you go through this process.

Step 6: GOOGLE PLUS LINKING

Now go to your Google Plus profile, and find where you can edit your profile. At the bottom of all the blocks, you’ll find an option for links and custom links. These are not for random links. It is very important that you do this correctly. There are three sections of links. The first section is for profiles. This is where you need to put your author profiles. The first line is for you to name the link. Spell your author name exactly as it is spelled in your author bios and profiles. The second line that says “URL” simply copy and past the address of your Amazon.com Author Profile or any author profile you have online.

This step is critical. I found that after completing this step many of the authors I was working with finally received their Google Author Verification. The second block of links is for your articles. Be sure and put the exact name of the article in the first line of this custom link, and be aware that to the right it will ask if you are a current or past contributor. I always put “current.” The last block of links be sure to include any websites that to write for or publish on. Just put their link. You may include YouTube Videos if you produced them, or Quora articles if you answered a question, or anything of value you have written on published to the web. Hit SAVE at the bottom of the links section.

Step 7: STRUCTURED DATA TOOL

Once you have all of your published works entered into your Google Plus profile, coded your author by lines an author bios to point to your Google Plus profile, and your author bio profiles entered into your Google Plus profile, next you’ll want to test to see if your authorship has been verified. Now you can test it. Find a URL of the page that one of your articles is published and paste it into the URL field of Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.