Greekgeek's Online Odyssey - Hubpages and Online Article Writing Tips

Three notes on Rel=”me”, Rel=”author” (They work!)

EDIT: DRAT. I spoke too soon. Google has changed how rel=”author” works, and try as I might, I can no longer get it to recognize authorship with Squidoo pages. Or at least, Google’s snippet validator isn’t recognizing it.

—–

 

Three notes on rel=”me” and rel=”author,” which I talked about last month.

  • It WORKS with an ordinary Google Profile, as opposed to a Google+ profile, if you’re annoyed with Google+ for various reasons. Here’s a screenshot of some Google results showing my author icon, linked to an ordinary Google account not Google Plus. (Alll the way at the bottom, but at least it draws the eye). Ignore the cache on the right… or don’t, because as you see, it’s one more way users may decide whether or not to visit your page:

Notice how the author icon  makes my link stand out from other text links on the same page, although perhaps I ought to create and add a “how to” YouTube video  as well to see if I can land in that section of Google results.

  • Your author icon will not appear next to your claimed content immediately. Over time, more and more content pages are showing my author icon. For search results that do not show my authorship icon, my author name is not listed either. This suggests that the author icon appears next to authored content AFTER it is re-crawled. 

Therefore, to get the author icon to show up on your older articles, edit and tweak the content, and PING them (on Squidoo, get SquidUtils’ Workshop Add-on and then click “ping” on the SU link that appears in the “Just published” page. Or just wait. Google re-crawls everything eventually.

Haven’t implemented rel=me on Squidoo yet? Here’s that tutorial again.

  • Thirdly, Google has CHANGED the way links are listed on your Google Profile. They’ve now been divided into “Other Profiles,” “Contributor to” and “Recommended Links.” The first one, “Other Profiles,” is obviously where you put your Squidoo, Wizzley, Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts. But what about blogs? I tried moving my blog-links to “Contributor to,” and it dropped rel=”me”  and tagged those links with rel=”contributor-to” instead. That doesn’t seem right. I’m still trying to figure out where one files blogs.

I think, perhaps, the best thing to do would be to create an Author Profile page on each blog where you are an author, set the other pages/entries on the site to point to that profile page with rel=”author,” and set up reciprocal rel=”me” links between the author profile and your Google profile. In other words, mimic the rel=”author” and rel=”me” setup that I’ve suggested with Squidoo, which we know works (see screencap above). But I haven’t implemented this yet, so I’m not sure I’m right. Why is it so bally complicated? Well, I’m sure we’ll be doing it with our eyes closed just like basic HTML in a few years.

4 Comments

  1. Correen says:

    Ellen I am trying to wade through understanding exactly how to link rel me/author to my articles. Is the Squidoo scenario?…
    1) Lensmaster profile has rel=me linked to Google profile
    2) My articles (lenses) have rel=author linked to my lensmaster profile
    3) My Google+ has lensmaster profile linked under “other profiles”

    Thanks for your help!!

    1. Greekgeek says:

      Yes, you’ve got it exactly right, Coreen!

      Except… unfortunately… Google is being arbitrary and stupid. My authorship is no longer showing up next to Google listings for my lenses, whereas it was working earlier, and I don’t know why. An industry expert on searchengineland.com reports the same thing: he had authorship, and now it’s not showing up any more.

      Possibly it’s because he and I have old Google profiles not Google+, so we don’t get the goodies. In which case what you’re doing should be all right. It’s working for SOME people, so…try it.

  2. Ladida Cafe says:

    When I use rich snippets testing tool, I find “Warning: Missing required field “updated”.” , can you tell me what’s wrong and how to solve that?
    Thank you

    1. Greekgeek says:

      Ladida, I’m so sorry! I don’t understand that error message and don’t know what’s causing it. I wish I could give you an answer!

      You might try asking in Google’s webmaster help forums. They aren’t always helpful, but sometimes somebody will know what’s wrong.

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