My feature presentation on how Google + works, optimization for Google+, the authorship markup, and the author graph

1. Google+
October 17, 2012

2. iCrossing - Agency services

3. with clients including…

4. Search and Social: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time
Content Marketing
• Covers interdependent
search and social
concepts
• Social signals on search
• Interview with Brett Tabke
and many others
• Ships Nov. 6
• 406 pages
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 4

5. Overview
• How to think about Google+
• Author and Publisher Markup
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 5

6. How to think about Google+

7. Google+ is not intended solely as a destination
like Facebook…
…It will instead provide a human social layer to inform
all of its products and services
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 7

8. Wanna know how Google+ works? Use your SEO
sensibilities
• People are nodes, just like websites are nodes
• Connections between people are measured just like
connections between links
• Social profiles also have keyword inference, themes and
authority, just like links and websites
• Natural language processing is critical to the social experience,
and infers intent and context, just like search
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 8

9. Ex. Of Social Relevancy: An SEO View of Google+
Consider the parallel aspects of websites, and Google+ accounts
• Domain authority : user ID
• Duplicate content : +1’ed and shared content
• Freshness : freshness
• Links : Circles, Shares
• Quality of links : Quality of people who have circled you
• Inbound links vs. outbound links : Ratio of your circles in contrast to
the number of people circling you
• Linking to bad : good neighborhoods
• Anchor text of links: Labeling of Circles
• Keyword themes of Google+ Users
A Big Week For Real-Time And Social Search, Search Insider
http://bit.ly/bigweek
What An Algorithmic Approach To Twitter's Social-Search Layer Might Look Like, Search Insider
http://bit.ly/algorithmic
9

10. Social Connections in Google+
The Google+ Webmaster FAQ states that the social connections
can influence visibility or other elements of your social experience
These connections may include:
•People in your Gmail chat list
•People in your Google contacts
•People you’re following on Google Reader
•People who are publicly connected to you in other networks such
as Twitter
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1067707
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 10

11. Yes, +1s can be used as a search signal
Google states that +1s from people in your
network can be a “useful signal” to help
determine the relevance of a search query.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1140194
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 11

12. For Search Signals, +1s are Measured within
Context of the Query Search query context: “cool SEO conference”
• When you +1 a result in
Google search, Google
captures the query you
used to find that result and
adds the context of that
keyword to your annotation
• This attribution of keyword
phrase context is similar to
the way search engines
apply the context of anchor
text to a link
Share context:
“search industry”
and “social” circles
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 12

13. Circles: Increased network size is an SEO tactic
• Annotation features like +1s appear only to those in a networks
• Your company presence becomes more prominent within the
SERPs of those who have circled you
• Tremendous first mover advantage
• Many companies slow to embrace Google+
• Build up your network
• Circle people who are relevant to you
• Invite people
• Circle those who share or publish content in Google+ that corresponds with
the main theme of your business
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 13

14. Authorship Markup

15. The Author Graph
• Measures influence,
authority, and theme, just
the way Google measures
other digital assets
• Your influence is reflected
by the quality and theme
of the publications you
write for, and by the
relative social signals for
those properties
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 15

16. Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 16

17. Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 17

18. Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 18

19. Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 19

20. Authorship: Connect the properties you write for in
your G+ Profile using Links
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 20

21. Establish a link back from the publications you
write for
• Once you have linked to your publications in the Contributor To section of your
profile page, you must also create a link back from your profile pages on the
third party sites
• If you contribute to your own sites, this will be easier to complete because you
have more control to add this link yourself or have someone in your company
do it for you
• If you are publishing on sites that you do not own, you will need to have an
administrator place these links back to your profile.
• The link on the publishing site must include the rel=author attribute and link
back to your profile on Google+. Your profile link should look like this:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/2222221111112?rel=author">Google</a>
• Be patient, because it may take up to several weeks to start appearing in the
search results.
• You can also use the Google rich snippet tool to test your authorship markup,
but remember that proper implementation does not guarantee that your
markup will appear in the search results.
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 21

22. Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 22

23. Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 23

24. Establishing Authorship with a Verified Email
Address
• A second method of verifying your connection between a
website and Google is with a verified email address.
• This email address should contain the domain of the site that
you publish on and that was submitted in the box on the
following URL: https://plus.google.com/authorship.
• Once your email address has been authenticated, Google will
add your address to the Work section of your profile. You can
then edit your profile to make it private or adjust the settings of
who should see your contact info.
• Make sure that all of your articles contain a byline with a brief
description of who you are and that each article you wrote is
preceded with “by.” Google looks for snippets of text that
contain the phrase “by+Author+Name” as a signal to reinforce
authorship.
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 24

25. Establishing Authorship Using WordPress
Plug-ins
• There are a variety of different WordPress plug-ins to help you
quickly establish rel=author for your individual authors or blogs
with multiple authors. Here are two examples of plug-ins to
help get you going:
• Authorsure: This plug-in works for both single-author and
multiauthor WordPress blogs
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/authorsure/
• Google Authorship for Multiple Authors: This tool is
designed mainly for blogs with multiple authors, and its creator
states that it needs to be customized in order to work for
single-author blogs
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-authorship-for-multiple-writers/
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 25

26. Publisher Markup

27. Publishers: Get a Google Badge
• Google Badge is a way to
connect your website directly to
your Google profile
• Google “strongly recommends”
that webmasters and publishers
make this connection.
• Google also refers to it as an
“enhanced version of the +1
button”
• In effect, it creates a sort of
handshake between your main
web asset and your Google+
presence and verifies your web
presence with Google as a
publisher
• Read more about Google
Badges at
https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/badge/config
.
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 27

28. Publishers: Get a Google Badge
• There are two other ways to confirm ownership of your site
with Google:
1) Create a rel="publisher" link from the main page of your website to your
Google+ page. The link code follows:
<a rel="publisher" href="https://plus.google.com/YourGoogle+AcctURLHere">Find
us on Google+</a>
2) If you don’t want to put the link on your public-facing page, you can include the
following code in the head section of your main page:
<link rel="publisher" href="https://plus.google.com/[yourpageID]" />
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 28

29. Thank you
Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential 29