G+ Authorship, Showing your image in the SERPs

[bluehabit]

Hello,
I am attempting to have my website and g+ authorship set up such that my g+ image shows up in the SERPs for my website. For an example of what I am trying to do see the image below.


In my google+ account I set myself as a contributor to my own site, and set up a my profile for g+ in wordpress authorship profile. As shown in the images below.


However when I search for myself the G+ image does not show up. I am not sure what I am doing wrong, but I made these changes over a week ago and I still do not have my image display in the SERPs. Please refer to the image attached to this post for this problem illustrated.

Thanks for your time and insight

 

[Linda Buquet]

Sorry, I'm not an expert on authorship yet, but some of our members are.
Hopefully someone can come by to help you later today.

 

[Thaddaeus]

bluehabit,

I went to Google's Structural Data Testing Tool to verify your Authorship (Google Structured Data Testing Tool) and your picture did not show next to your website. Test it yourself.

Also, it said that your website does not contain Authorship or Publisher markup.

What does all this mean? Although you've verified and connected your website to your Google+ account, Google still can't prove that the two are connected.

A suggestion - I see you are using Wordpress for your website, and you've entered your Google+ info in your User page, but I don't think that's enough for Google to verify. I use this plug in for my website (it's free) - Google Authorship Links: A WordPress Plugin. Follow the directions and it should work for you.

A couple of questions:

1. Are you trying to link your personal Google+ profile or your Google+ page? The picture will not show for Google+ pages (unless Google is testing something for 24 hours lol).
2. Verify your Google+ link - maybe you left a digit off somewhere?
3. If you checked all of this, and your picture still does not show, I've had the experience that pictures do not show all the time for home pages, or even pages of Wordpress sites for some reason. Posts show more often. If you do some searching around and see the results with Authorship pictures I believe most of them will be posts.

Good luck - and let me know if this solves your problem.

 

[bluehabit]

bluehabit,

I went to Google's Structural Data Testing Tool to verify your Authorship...

Thank you so much for your indepth reply Thaddaeus. To answer your question
1. Personal g+ profile
2. Its accurate, see the image below. You will see the URL to my personal g+ page, and when you view page source on my home page you will see the same url with the rel=author tag.

I downloaded the plugin for google authorship but it still doesnt seem to be working correclty, not sure what I am doing wrong. When I test the page with rich snippet tool it displays "page does not contain authorship mark"

 

[Thaddaeus]

1. Go to your user profile - the plugin you just installed should have installed another Google Profile URL field there. Insert your Google+ profile link there
2. Go to the Google Author Link plugin link inside your Wordpress dashboard. Make sure you select as your Home Page User profile "chrisfeltus"
3. Leave the Google Publisher Profile URL blank (for now)
4. After you do all of this, test your website plus additional pages and posts of your website.
5. Lastly, did you add your website to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en? I don't have any proof that this helps Authorship, but I have added my website to it.

 

[bluehabit]

Thanks again Thaddaeus.

As you can see below I have done what you have instructed, yet it still will not show up in the rich snippet tool.

 

[Thaddaeus]

bluehabit,

It's working! Use this page We Buy Houses Denton| We Buy Ugly Houses Denton| Feltus Family Homes

The home page is not showing up, but let me think about that a little and get back to you.

 

[bluehabit]

Thanks Thaddaeus, I really appreciate all your help and looking into my home page!

I went ahead and approved your comment on my blog, I assume you might be needing it to test something.

Thanks again, truly

 

[Thaddaeus]

No problem. By the way, the comment wasn't mine.

 

[bluehabit]

Thanks for all the help Thaddaeus. Now that g+ authorship is set up correctly on my website (minus the homepage), what influences if google actually uses my picture to where it shows up in the SERPs?

I went ahead and added to the website to my analyitcs/web master account as well.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Make sure to:

• Use a profile photo with a recognizable head shot.
• Try to make sure your name appears on each page of the content: "by John Smith"

 

[Thaddaeus]

Honestly I do not know. As I stated earlier, it seems as the Authorship photo shows up more for posts than the home page, but why this happens has to do with the Google algo I guess. I think Google is figuring this out too.

Here's a link on this from Webmaster World: Google Authorship - Changes to "when" the authorship snippet is shown? Google SEO News and Discussion forum at WebmasterWorld

 

[Kristen]

This post helped me get the photo to show for search results: Google Authorship Markup: How to get your picture in search results.

In addition to linking from the site to the plus profile, adding the contributor to and the option, and adding the author name to posts on the blog, I had to verify the primary email address associated with the Google plus profile. Once I did that, the photo began showing shortly after.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

In addition to linking from the site to the plus profile, adding the contributor to and the option, and adding the author name to posts on the blog, I had to verify the primary email address associated with the Google plus profile. Once I did that, the photo began showing shortly after.

It also gives Google a little author scent to follow when you add a work e-mail to the contact us section and verify it, as long as the e-mail is on the same domain as the website/blog you are linking to in the "contributor to" section.

Is that what you mean?

 

[Kristen]

No, but that's a good idea too. I tried verifying an email address that was NOT the primary one used to set up the plus profile and that didn't work.

When I verified the PRIMARY address through Google's form here: https://plus.google.com/authorship, it worked.