Yoast needs to offer a list of features in the plugin, with links to explanations of how to use them.
What you ask for was announced here: http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-1-2/
under the heading “Rel=”author””
But even than omits a step, which I think he mentioned in a blog post. As the above says, the user can go to their Profile and fill in the URL of their Google Plus profile. They should also go to their G+ settings, find the Contribute section, and add the URL of the home page of every site which they contribute to. That establishes that both the site and the author are cooperating.
If authors have a picture in their G+ profile, watch for that picture to start appearing in search results. 🙂
AH. And I call myself a professional. Doh.
YES: I now see that the field is added to the author/user profile page. Double doh.
Thanks for the heads up on that. I missed the June update note, or didn’t read it fully, or just had a bran fart of some kind.
THANK YOU for the follow up. 🙂
I dont see in the source code on our websites any rel=author markup? Am I missing something? Looking at Yoast’s website (Yoast.com) the rel=author is in there but when using the plugin on ours and triple checking the settings the code doesnt appear.
Please help.
If you look here, you can see it working:
http://www.clausen-hassan.com/divorce-process/what-are-divorce-papers-the-proper-names-and-what-they-are-used-for/
If you look at the source code, you find rel=author.
The user has gone in his Profile and linked to the About page in the Google Plus profile. He also went in G+ and stated that he contributes to this web site, although that does not affect rel=author appearing on the site.
Notice also that Yoast also allows a default author to be defined for the blog homepage in SEO > Titles & Metas > Home.
The result is visible in this search result; this being a ridiculously specific search, you’ll probably find it at the top:
https://www.google.com/search?q=what-are-divorce-papers-the-proper-names-and-what-they-are-used-for
If you use a cache, you might want to try to flush it, in case you were seeing old results.
HI, Jchura
basically you need to
1) go into the user profile and put the link to the Google+ page for the author in the first box in the profile (in my setup, we ended up with two, one at top, one at bottom, for different purposes) …
2) in the Google+ account for the author you need to point back at the site, to “authorize” the connection (see Google’s help for this online)
3) then, when a post is published in the HEAD section of the source code, in the Yoast grouping, you’ll see the rel author tag, as on my page here, where I was trying to get it to be seen: http://ga-ga.com/40-something-and-counting-developing-cataracts-at-age-45/
Now it works, as I had put the Google+ code in our second box in each user profile (custom field), NOT the one setup by the yoast plugin which was closer to top of the social media fields.
So … the most recent Yoast SEO *does* support this feature, which I had entirely missed due to more than one Google+ field in the user profiles (doh).
Hope that helped a little!
neotrope, I only see one Google+ field in my WP Profile, in the “Contact Info” section. That field works fine, when it has the URL for the “About” page in my G+ profile.
At the bottom of my WP Profile, the “WordPress SEO settings” section only has two fields: “Title to use for Author page”, and “Meta description to use for Author page”
RoamFree .. great, then that’s the one to use. In my case, as a publishing firm, we have some in-house plugins we’d been using prior to moving to YOAST so, we had already added some extra fields using the hack to the config file for WP commonly done (but you can ignore this …).
Basically, you need to put the link to your main Google+ profile page without any of the ?=whatever junk on the end.
THIS MAY BE USEFUL TO ANYBODY READING THIS THREAD: the official Google how-to page on this topic:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2539557
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2539557
(I am putting it in here twice, as URL and CODE, since sometimes strings get whacked on forums … )
Hope that helps!
