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Notes for 2015. The importance of this is depreciated since of course it was misused.
Google +, with it’s ability to ‘verify’ the existence of a real person and offer all Google products within a couple clicks, is a white hat SEO‘s dream come true.

If you manage many Fb pages for small to medium sized business[I manage +/- 20], you know how the changes over the last year have greatly reduced the page’s worth as a marketing tool. It seems goog has been watching the neverending stream of complaints directed at Fb, especially from a mid size business perspective, and have gone ahead and made their social network a super alternative. Alternative is the right word because Plus is actually quite different than Facebook.

google authorship markup resultsA good way to start using Google plus for SEO is adding authorship and publisher markup on your web-pages. This may prompt Google to display your Google plus profile picture on search results pages next to the links that highlight  your work. It may also prompt your business page logo to be shown on search results pages as well. !!! Come on, which link are you going to click, the link with the verified picture next to it or the hundreds of other nameless faceless results?

Publisher Markup. First thing to do is add the publisher markup to your homepage. This is easy, it’s just tweaking a link to your business page. My business page url is https://plus.google.com/104197066146444489949 and all I must do is add ?rel=publisher to the end for…

Examplehttps://plus.google.com/104197066146444489949?rel=publisher

You can also get an official google widget that will accomplish this. Navigate to your Google plus business page, click the gear located toward the top right of the content area under the header image, then click get started. Under connect your website > get the badge.

Authorship Markup. Verifying authorship of a page is a similar process but first add links to the websites you contribute to from your Google plus profile under the “About” > “Contributor to…” heading. Then link to your Google plus personal page from any article or web-page you authored. My Google plus personal profile is https://plus.google.com/109114557514899329043/ and all i must do is add ?rel=author to the end of the link like so

Examplehttps://plus.google.com/109114557514899329043?rel=author

After adding this markup to your pages you can test it’s validity with the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.  That page is also used to check Schema. – Stephen James Hall

[schema type=”person” name=”Stephen James Hall” orgname=”Netometry ” jobtitle=”Web Coordinator” url=”https://urlmd.com” description=”Blog post about Google authorship & publisher verification as it relates to SEO.” country=”US” email=”[email protected]” ]