Google Authorship on Giant Robots

Caleb Hearth

You may have noticed a recent addition to our blog posts. We concluded an experiment to add a “Written by [Author Name]” byline and link the author’s name to their Google+ profile.

Google calls this Authorship. It is a feature that lets you verify that you are the author of some content, such as a blog post. It is kind of like a microformat that Google uses in its search algorithms. It also causes an author’s face to show in Google search results:

Harlow's face in search results

We take the following one-time steps to set up Google Authorship for each author on our blog:

  1. Get a Google+ account.
  2. Verify our email address for the domain, which will automatically add you as a collaborator of that website on Google+.

Now, whenever we author a post for one of those websites, we take the following steps:

  1. Add a byline that has a link like Written by <a rel='author' href='http://plus.google.com/GOOGLE_PLUS_ID'>AUTHOR NAME</a>..
  2. Link back to the article from our Google+ profile.

The links in both directions are help to confirm authorship of the article.

We can then see statistics on impressions, clicks, click-through rates, and average position in search results for pages for which we are the verified author:

Dan's stats

Google Authorship is a nice way for us to better understand how our content appears in Google searches as well as expose our content to a wider audience.

About thoughtbot

We've been helping engineering teams deliver exceptional products for over 20 years. Our designers, developers, and product managers work closely with teams to solve your toughest software challenges through collaborative design and development. Learn more about us.