I really want to get a better handle on google’s concept of authorship… As I find it’s always best to learn by trying to implement things, I spent some time this afternoon trying to configure myself as an “official” author within google search results.

The idea is that my profile photo should show up next to search results where I’m an author (similar to what google does for my google plus updates that get indexed):

Here are some of the things I did:

• I added my Google Plus account to the author section of my company blog posts (You can see an example here: Naughty or Nice), and although I don’t think this was necessary, to be extra safe, I verified my work email
• I added a link to my google plus account to the sidebar of this blog (I don’t have a “author” section under each post, so hoping this does the trick!). Again, to be safe, I also verified my domain email for my personal blog.
• I added links from my Google Profile to both my personal and my work blog.
• I updated my google profile photo make sure it was a clear profile picture
• I updated my name on both blogs to make sure it matched my Google Profile exactly
• Made sure to include the text: “?rel=author” to the google plus url string. As in: https://plus.google.com/+DustinLuther/?rel=author

That’s all I know to do at this point.

Now it’s just a waiting game as I check google to see if my “authorship” status starts showing up next to searches like these:

And if I missed something in setting up Google authorship (or I should have configured stuff in a better way), I would love to know!

UPDATE — First signs of success!
After hitting publish on my latest blog post (The Benefits of Relentless Networking), I noticed that my name shows up as an author next to that post for the term “Relentless Networking“! Thinking google still needs to reindex all my “old” posts, but this seems like great progress to me! 🙂