How To Setup Google’s Verified Authorship in WordPress with Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin

UPDATE: Google has officially stopped supporting Google Authorship. So there’s no longer any point in implementing what’s explained in this blog post.

Want to get your Google+ Profile’s avatar to show up next to your WordPress blog posts and/or pages in Google’s search results?

The following is an example of what that looks like:

Google Plus Author Avatar in Google Search Results

How To Setup Google’s Verified Authorship in WordPress

  1. Setup a Google+ account for yourself if you haven’t already
  2. Install Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin
  3. In the plugin, go to Social > Google+
  4. If you want your avatar to show up for your home page listing, select your WordPress user as Author for homepage and if you have a Google+ page for your website, add the URL for it in the Google Publisher Page like I did for Penguin Initiatives in the following screenshot. Note that your Google Publisher Page URL will be a long series of numbers, unless they gave you a custom alias like they have for Penguin Initiatives.
    Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Google Plus Settings
  5. Next make sure that you have added your Google+ profile URL for your WordPress user account that you write your blog posts with like in the following screenshot. You can do this in Users > Your Profile. Again note that your Google Profile Page URL will be a long series of numbers, unless they gave you a custom alias like they have for me. Make sure this WordPress user is the author of the posts you want to be considered the author for.
    WordPress User Profile Google+ Field
  6. Finally in your Google+ Profile make sure you add your WordPress website and set it as you being a Contributor to it like in the following screenshot. You can do this by going to the About section of your Google+ Profile and then clicking on the Edit link in the Links section.
    Google+ Profile Links
  7. You can verify that everything is setup properly on any specific page by viewing the source, if it is setup properly you’ll see the following lines of HTML in the HEAD of your web page: 
    <!-- Specifies your Google+ Profile as the Author -->
	<link href="https://plus.google.com/+AndyForsberg/" rel="author" />
<!-- Specifies your Google+ Page as the Publisher -->
	<link href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Penguininitiatives/" rel="publisher" />
  8. Now your Google+ Profile’s avatar will be listed next to your blog posts and/or pages that you author with your WordPress user. Simply follow the same process for your other WordPress users if you want to setup Google+ authorship for them as well.

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29 COMMENTS

  1. I have followed EVERYTHING you have above over two weeks ago. Under Contributor To, I did put my website and my website blog. And still…there is NO PHOTO by any Google Search result. Could you be kind enough to give me help on this?

    • Hey Janie, sorry to hear that! I’d be happy to. Please send the URL of the page/post you’re trying to get it to work on as well as the URL of your Google+ profile page. If you don’t want to share it in the comments feel free to send this to just me via the contact form.

  2. Hi Andy, could you explain how to do this for other users on my WordPress blog. Obviously in Yoast I can only fill this in for 1 person (me), and I’ve tried adding the Google+ link in the Users’ profiles, and they say they’ve added the link in their Google+ contributor to section, but it still doesn’t seem to be working. I’m testing using Google Structured Data Tool for each URL. Thanks for any help

  5. Hi Andy,

    This is a really helpful article, thanks for sharing! I may share with some clients in the future.

    Google Plus and Authorship are really great for SEO reasons, so taking the time to set them up is worth it.

    -Keller

  6. Hey Andy,

    I’m not finding the correct lines of HTML in the Head confirming this was done correctly. I have yet to write my first blog post, but would it be nice to have this set up already. Thanks for you help.

    Danny

    • Hey Danny,

      It looks like the publisher tag is showing up. If you send me a link to an example blog post (whenever you post one) I can take a look. If you don’t have yourself set as the author of the home page it won’t show up there.

  10. Hello,
    I am stuck right at the beginning – please help! I installed Yoast, went to Social >Google+ I did not get the same page as you show. There is no place to add my authorship? Help!

  12. hi! I’m using this plugin and i love it. but now I’m trying this authorship and i cant figure out a few things.
    First; i dont have a author for home page at step 4.
    second: i cant find any Google+ text box in user profile (step 5)
    im using the clipper them. please help me as ive been banging my head my head for solving this issue but cant find any solution

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