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How to Get Author Thumbnail Photos in Google Search…

January 25, 2013
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: Lately when I search in Google, a lot of my competitors have nice looking photos next to their site listings. How can I get a photo of me to show up next to my site?

A: What you’re seeing in Google is called a rich snippet that is present thanks to authorship display for either a full website, or for individual pages on a site. Originally used primarily by news sites to identify journalists who penned articles, this search enhancement is now seen for everyone from dentists to dogsitters. We love authorship because it adds a personality and credibility to a website, and it’s appropriate for a wide range of businesses and entities – anyone who’s comfortable adding a human face to the site.

Why Set Up Authorship?

Authorship display is not considered a factor in Google ranks but there are other good reasons to pursue it. Here are some benefits of authorship display:

Make your search listings more noticeable and potentially increase the number of clickthroughs on your listings
Create a visible signal of credibility for your content in search
Get more Google+ followers
Help readers discover more of your content by clicking the “more by” link

How To Set Up Authorship With Google

Step 1 is very important: Make sure you have a Google+ profile, as it is required for authorship display.

Step 2: Once you’ve got your Google+ profile set up, there are two routes you can take to set up authorship display:

Authorship Method 1:

If your email account (jdoe@my-domain.com) is the same as your content domain (my-domain.com/this-is-a-page/), then follow the two steps below:

(a) Make sure that any articles you post on your site have a clear byline identifying you as the author (e.g., “By John Doe”), using the exact same name as you have in your Google+ account.

(b) Visit Google’s authorship page and submit your email address (make sure you are logged into your Google account when doing this).

Once your email address is submitted on the authorship page, Google will crawl pages on your domain looking for by-lines that contain your name. When it finds the by-lines containing your name, Google will display authorship information for those pages.

Authorship Method 2:

If you don’t have an email address on the same domain as your content, follow the steps below:

(a) Add the following link pointing to your Google+ profile anywhere on your page:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/[your-account-number]?rel=author”>Google</a>

For example:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/109097091682601072107?rel=author”>Google</a>

(b) Edit the “Contributor To” section in your Google+ profile with a link pointing to the domain that you just placed the link on.

This method works on a page-by-page basis, so you will need to include the link to your Google+ profile on every page for which you want authorship display. One advantage of using this tag is that it can be placed on pages that are not articles and do not have bylines.

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Setting up authorship display requires just a small investment of time, and has nice potential benefits. We hope you’ll give it a try!

seo test

SEO for Adobe Edge Animate [Updated]

November 24, 2012
by Gradiva Couzin

Adobe Edge Animate is a new platform (in “preview” mode) that allows developers to create Flash-like user experiences including animation built with HTML 5 rather than Flash.

This bodes well for cross-platform compatibility (*cough*iPad*cough*), but what are the SEO implications? Can Google adequately crawl content that is placed on a page with Adobe Edge Animate? We set out to answer these questions by looking at two test pages created with Adobe Edge Animate:

When we first looked at the Adobe Edge preview in May 2012, we did not see any promising SEO advantages to using Edge over Flash, as the content generated was not search-engine-crawlable. As of November, 2012, Adobe has updated Edge to include multiple tools & services whilst renaming the main component from “Edge Preview” to “Edge Animate” to go along with other tools in the Suite: Reflow, Code, Inspect, and Web Fonts.

The other tools aid in the development process; for this blog post, we are focused on the SEO implications of Edge Animate.

Since last previewing Adobe Edge in early 2012, we are now seeing a promising new feature in the latest builds: “Publish Content as Static HTML”

When this option is selected, Adobe emits “HTML markup for SEO friendliness.”

In early 2012, we noticed that Google would not crawl the content from Adobe Edge which is housed in JavaScript. The HTML code you get from the default publish option in Adobe Edge is the following:

As a workaround we entered in some alternate text (with and without noscript tags) and Google was able to crawl both. View the source and snippet in Test Example One to see how this came out.

Now, as of November 2012, our previously workaround is no longer necessary. Instead, you can use the “Publish Content as Static HTML” feature in Edge Animate. When this is enabled, Adobe renders the readable text as HTML elements for SEO friendliness, like this truncated example below:

You can view the source in Test Two to see how it fully renders the HTML content. Test One and Test Two use the same source file from Edge Animate, the only difference is selecting the Publish Static HTML option.

With this new option, Google can crawl the Adobe Edge content; and with that, this new platform is shaping up to be a promising SEO-friendly replacement to Flash.

How to Get Author Thumbnail Photos in Google Search…

Q: Lately when I search in Google, a lot of my competitors have nice looking photos next to their site listings. How can I get a photo of me to show up next to my site?

SEO for Adobe Edge Animate [Updated]

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