How to Show Your Author Photo in Google Search Results
I decided to do a detailed post on how to get your google + profile photo show up on google search results and had made up half a post 1 week ago but now decided not ot post about it as the internet is full of “how to” posts within that 7 days. Serves me right for being so lazy and procrastinating.. so now i have changed my post a bit and made it short for you.
Get your picture in google search results
What you will need to check if you have done the right thing to get your google Plus picture in google search results is the Google rich snippets checker which is also available outside Google webmaster tools, so get a google webmaster tools account if you dont have acess to it and add your website domain while you are there. It will also help to get your google analytics account linked to your webmaster tools while you are doing this b, but its not necessary.
When i put one of my blog posts in this to check if my photo appeared in search results ,its gave me a warning ( VERIFY two author profiles showing up ) that two author profiles were showing up , after a lot o checking i found out that in my word press user profile i had put in my google+ login username in the google username column and then in the theme where it asked for google username after the url https://plus.google.com – i put in my google plus id 103166021597134967036 , so this were actually showing up as two different Google ids creating a problem. so i went back to my word press user profile and changed the username over there to to the user id digits( 103166021597134967036) i got from my google + profile and now both google plus usernames matched and it got verified.
Essentially if you get your pic from google profile in google search results you are stealing clicks from your google top rankers as google searchers always like a image instead of normal boring text. Getting your author profile photos in the search results is a feature Google began rolling out in 2010.
This tutorial is mainly for WordPress blogging platform, but can be applied to tother blogs and websites with minor edits.
Verifiying your Author Profile with Google
There are many benefits to verifying your author name and profile with Google like below
- Build Author Rank with Google search.
- Facial images in google search results are very eye-catching.
- Google will promote your content over duplicate content on the internet.
How to – Google Author Verification in WordPress
Step 1: Create a Google+ Profile
Step 2 : Make sure you list your google + user id ( which is numbers immediately after your google + profile url) in your google username column in wordpress user profile and in your theme settings ( where it asks for google username)as well
Step 3: Check with rich snippets tool to verify if your author photo will show up.( link above)
If you want to read articles with more detailed post on how to do this you can read Micheal Grays post or then Mohammad posts or Virante posts on this.
Google + picture from profile not showing up
If after doing all this and getting verified in google rich snippets , your picture in still not showing up in google search results , it can be because of this note from google (Note that there is no guarantee that a Rich Snippet will be shown for this page on actual search results. For more details, see the FAQ.)
