Easiest Setup of Google Authorship tag in Blogger

For about 2 years now, one of the most severe pain where-you-don’t-want is setting up of the Google Authorship with the ‘rel=author’ tag.  When I did it back in 2012, it was worse that jumping through hoops.  It continued to remain a cumbersome procedure, especially if you are on Google’s own Blogger platform; WordPress at least had half a dozen plugins, and invariably one or other did plug in nicely.

Over the weekend, I set about refreshing the blog template.  Basically what I did was to wipe off all the gadgets, delete the template (another irksome procedure which requires a write-up on its own), and sort of shoe-horned a fresh copy, without any of my ‘tweaks’.  The intention was to provide for individual author tags and credit for the other two writers.  Till now, every post was tagged - in a half-assed-way - to me, and not to the individual authors in search results.

Here is the snapshot of the 5 day old post throwing up an error for the author Krishnan Vadhyar.



Earlier it was a three step procedure to correct this error. 

• The first was to ensure the particular author’s Google Plus profile page had the requisite link to the blog URL under contributor section.
• The second was to ensure that the ‘author’ by-line in the individual post, is exactly the same as that of the Google+ ID.
• The third and irritating step was to ensure the authors inserted the ‘rel=author’ html code into the article itself, before posting to the blog.  This is where utter confusion used to ensure, and once in a while the author tags used to be interchanged.
• The alternate was to fiddle around with the Blogger template and write ‘b:if’ codes, so the correct corresponding tag/by-line is inserted by Blogger.  This workaround is handy, but every time a new author chimes in, his code has to be added into the template.

Now the 3rd bothersome step has been taken care of by Blogger.  It has become a breeze to ensure proper authorship, with the ‘Show Author Profile below post’ option in the ‘Configure Blog Posts’ window.  Log into Blogger with administrator rights, click on Layout, and edit 'Blog Posts' window.  In the pop-up scroll down and check mark the ‘Show Author Profile below post’ option.  Click save and Viola, and you are done.



Within a few minutes, a check on the Google Rich Snippets Tool shows the correct authorship.  Now, is that not a breeze?  No more fiddling around with the template.  No more eye strain to ensure the correct author tag is manually inserted in the article.

Here is the screen-grab a few minutes later.

Tags: google-authorship,rel=author

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