Guide to setting up rel=publisher
You may have noticed a few changes to the blog over the last couple of days. Firstly, I have updated the logo to be a little more fun than basic text reading ‘SEO Trench’. You may argue that it looks like a sex shop sign from New York in the mid-80s – well, I presume that is what it would have looked like – but you shouldn’t read my post for my graphic design skills! Hopefully the SEO advice is useful.
This blog looks at adding the ‘rel=publisher’ tag and what you can expect once Google acknowledges it.
First thing – make sure you have a Google+ account setup and ready to go. The SEO Trench Google+ account is already done and ready to go. Step two is to add the following code to the
<link href=”[YOUR GOOGLE+ URL in here]” rel=”publisher” /><script type=”text/javascript”>
window.___gcfg = {lang: ‘en’};
(function()
{var po = document.createElement(“script”);
po.type = “text/javascript”; po.async = true;po.src = “https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
})();</script>
So, this should look like this when you check the back end code (please click to enlarge):
This piece of code informs Google of the publisher account, which could be an individual account or a business account. I’ve selected the SEO trench account rather than my personal one, although my personal account is used for rel=author. The final step is to add in the code that integrates the Google+ button:
The button above is setup using the following code (I dropped mine on the right hand sidebar under the Twitter icon):
<g:plus href=”https://plus.google.com/112928441071246239251″ width=”100″ height=”131″ theme=”dark”></g:plus>
Once added, you’re done! All you need to check is Google’s rich text snippet tool to make sure you’ve set everything up correctly (please click to enlarge):
That should be it! Now, you play the waiting game, but I would definitely recommend setting this up. Any SEO worth his or her salt will have been thinking about social for at least the past two years and Google+ isn’t going anyway. We’ve seen with Google search plus your world how the data is being integrated into the SERPs, even if the Google+ account isn’t relevant to the query!
Any questions, drop them in the comments box please.
Useful resources for rel=publisher: