Google Authorship - They've Changed The Rules a Bit

Sometimes I think I'm awfully slow getting through the training and incorporating it into my website. My latest hurdle was Course 2 Lesson 9, Google Authorship. I found out that the rules have changed a bit since the lesson was created.

At present, Kyle has updated the training to cover one of the changes. That is, Google no longer puts your profile picture next to your listing in the search results when you have implemented Google Authorship. Ok, I get that.

Next, though, is a struggle I had with getting authorship to work at all, due to another change that Google has made. They now require that your Wordpress profile have an email address hosted on your domain, associated with your Wordpress profile, that Google can verify. It isn't very clear what it is that they are asking for, but I got the impression that somehow your Google + account should have some way to identifiy that the email address listed in your Wordpress profile actually associates to your Google + profile.

I struggled with that for awhile, and finally gave up thinking that I hadn't figured it out correctly. Yesterday when I was puzzling over it, I tried the rich snippet tool only to have it tell me that authorship wasn't set up for my website.

But today after work, I tried rich snippet again, and lo and behold, it now recognizes my authorship. I guess it needed time to digest my Wordpress profile updates. I don't know how Google figured out that the email address I added to my Wordpress profile actually matches me in my Google + profile, since there is no place in the Google + profile to list it. But it seemed to work.

It isn't perfect, though. Rich snippet reports errors for each person's comments that are associated with my blog posts, and another "error: required field missing 'updated'". I don't know how to fix those yet.

But even with the errors, the results have been phenomenal. Before, my website and all my posts were totally invisible to google searches. Now, I have two keyword specific posts that show up, one on the third page and the other on the fourth page of Google keyword search results. And that is with pretty thin content so far; I only have five posts total and a few pages with just a few lines each.

That isn't money in the bank yet, but it's gratifying progress! It just goes to show that following the training, building your website as explained, and writing good content, will eventually lead to success!

I'm pumped!

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