I think I conquered Google+ Authorship and Publisher

[UPDATE May 12, 2014: I was just watching a video where Jay (magistudios) says that Google is no longer showing the Google Authorship picture if the picture is from a Google+ page rather than a Google+ personal profile. Hmmm...I'll have to re-think this strategy.]

I spent a lot of time on getting Google+ set up! As you can see below, some of my approach was trial and error. I think (I hope!!) I finally have it! I'll be optimistic and mark this post as a "success post".

I haven't ever used Google+, though I have a gmail email account. When I signed into Google+ I discovered I already had a Google+ personal profile and another Google+ "page" (apparently I got this additional page because I had a YouTube account). It took me a while to figure out what was going on and to be clear that I wanted to keep the page and the profile separate and, per Kyle's video instructions, use the profile for authorship for my website. After understanding that, I got authorship associated with my Google+ profile and working without to much difficulty by following Kyle's video.

But after thinking about the issue over night, I decided that I did not want to connect my personal Google+ profile with my RuralAttractions.com business site. So, I created a new rural Attractions Google+ PAGE (not to be confused with a PROFILE) under my Google+ profile to associate with that site. But after doing that I was having a lot of difficulty getting authorship working :(

Based upon some research I did on the differences between using pages and profiles, I determiend that I need to do the following:

First, I added my site email (faith@ruralattractions.com) to my Google+ page.

Next I added my www.RuralAttractions.com website to the Google+ Rural Attractions page and confirm that I owned the site. To get this done, I went into Google webmaster tools and added the site URL there.

Then I added www.RuralAttractions.com as a custom link in the Google+ Page (I'm not sure if this was required or not??).

Finally, I went into WP admin to add the Google+ link to my new Rural Attractions Google+ page.

I would have thought that would have done it, but no! The Google Structured Data Testing Tool was telling me: "Automatically detected author name on webpage not found".

A lot research revealed that sometimes this message is due to a poor quality picture, so I changed my picture. No luck.

I discovered that the concept of "authorship" relates to a particular person and the concept of "publisher" applies to pages and that I needed to establish the site, as a whole, as being "published" by my Google+ Rural Attractions page and any content on the site as being "authored" by me.

I found some information about adding author and publisher tags to the code of my site. I added the specified publisher code in the header code, and that did get the site marked as being published by my Google+ Rural Attractions page, but it wasn't quite right because every page was showing this published by info and authorship was still not working (same error as above).

Further research indicated that I needed to have a designation in my content that I was the author, but I couldn't figure out how to get this done until I came across a suggestion to use the Plugin called "AuthorSure". I removed the publisher code I had added to the site and installed AuthorSure. Before proceeding I updated my gravatar with a better head shot picture (I'm not clear if this matters, but I wanted to use the same author picture on my website as I was using for my Google+ Rural Attractions page authorship that would show in Google search results (and I had updated that pic because the original one was very dark--see above).

After installing, activating and setting up the plugin everything SEEMS to be working (fingers crossed)! I checked all of the content on my site in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. The home page shows with both the publisher and authorship info (which I think is what I want). The posts and the pages of content are marked with authorship. The links on my sites that are merely a category "page" are marked with publisher only (no authorship).

Note that for this whole process, I used the ID of my Rural Attractions Google+ page not my Google+ personal profile because I made the personal decision that I did not want to use my personal profile for my business (for similar reasons that I try not to use my personal gmail email address for my online businesses).