Eric Nagel

I’ve previously blogged about how to add Rel Author Markup on your Thesis-themed blog, which is great for blogs run by one (or more) people. But what if you have a site that isn’t run by a person, but rather a brand? You can get your brand’s page to be listed as the “author” of the page, and include your logo in the SERPs. Here’s how:

First, you’ll need to create your Google+ page for your website. When you’re logged in to Google+, go to the Manage Your Pages page then click on the Create button to create a new page. Once you’ve created your page (including a nice avatar), make sure you add a link from your page profile back to your site. This is very important!

Next, all of your blog posts must link back to your Google+ page. I do this by adding my Google+ page URL into my WordPress user profile. There’s a certain format to follow, however, so copy this URL and change the ID to your Google+ page ID

https://plus.google.com/116136250255806002474?rel=author

Once you have that saved, you can link your posts back to your Google+ page by editing your theme’s “single.php” file, and linking the author’s name back to

get_the_author_meta('user_url')

Lazy solution: Just add a plain href into your site’s footer, linking back to your Google+ page

Now you have each blog post linking to your Google+ page (with the added query string, rel=author), and your Google+ page linking back to your blog. This circular-linking is important as it proves to Google that you manage both accounts.

If you think you’ve done everything right, check it out using the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool. You should see your Google+ page listed along with the result.

Like real-person rel author markup, now you sit back & wait for Google to pick up on the changes.