--- title: Google Authorship on Giant Robots teaser: tags: playbook author: Caleb Hearth published_on: 2013-05-22 --- You may have noticed a recent addition to our blog posts. We [concluded an experiment](http://tinyletter.com/thoughtbot/letters/the-bot-cave-april-2013) to add a "Written by \[Author Name\]" byline and link the author's name to their Google+ profile. Google calls this [Authorship](https://plus.google.com/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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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][harlow] [harlow]: http://f.cl.ly/items/3M1207273s22361Q2X1n/Screen%20Shot%202013-05-19%20at%202.12.26%20PM.png We take the following one-time steps to set up Google Authorship for each author on our blog: 1. Get a [Google+](https://google.com/+) account. 1. [Verify our email address](https://plus.google.com/authorship) 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 .`. 1. 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](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/labs-author-stats-1?pli=1) for pages for which we are the verified author: ![Dan's stats][dan] [dan]: http://f.cl.ly/items/411M0X1R383F2s3g1b47/Screen%20Shot%202013-05-20%20at%2010.21.40%20AM.png 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.