Very Simple Process to Claim Authorship of Pages with Google

Posted on May 9, 2012 by curiouscat

There are lots of posts explaining how to claim authorship of pages with Google. I find them very complex, by and large.

I was able to use this simple process.

Include by author text with a link to the author page using rel=”author” In WordPress you can just edit the theme page to have the author link include the rel=”author” tag.

<a rel="author" href="http://johnhunter.com/">John Hunter</a>

For WordPress blog with multiple authors here is the syntax to use (this pulls the author url from their profile. The author can update their web site url when logged into the blog.

<a rel="author" href="<?php the_author_meta('user_url'); ?>"><?php the_author() ?></a>

Then connect author page to Google+ profile. You can make this most any page (Google may exclude some free sites). Most people use the about page or author pages on the same blog they are trying to claim authorship of. But all that really matters is linking this page to your Google+ profile (obviously substitute your url), I have many sites with my material so my home page is what I used, I just added the following to that page.
```
<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/123" rel="me">Google+</a>
```
Then link your Google+ profile to the authorship page you want to use. You can add it under Other profiles or contributor to. This is the trickest part do to very bad UI of Google+ you have to go into edit mode and then click on the areas (there is no indication they are editable until you click – extremely bad UI, Google seems to very much like this hard to understand hidden UI elements lately, hopefully that will end soon). Likely Google will fix this at some point so this part will no longer matter. All you do is at the page you want, for me

To test out whether things are working you can go into Google webmaster tools to the rich snippets area. Test out a url you claimed authorship of and you should see something like:

Google can now use your Google+ profile to include a photo (from your Google+ profile) next to search results

With those simple changes over 1,000 posts on my blog were updated. It took far longer to search for and read a bunch more complex ways of accomplishing this than actually doing this once I was able to see what little had to be done. Writing this post took way longer. Now I just have to do step one for other sites and blogs and they will all be updated to show my authorship (for those I already had on my Google+ profile, if they were not listed there yet they have to be added).

There are many benefits to establishing authorship through Google.

Google can include your photo next to search results. Especially until people get tired of this, it will likely increase clicks on your links. And even after people are tired of it, if they notice your photo (and respect you) that may well increase clicks.
Builds your personal brand
Google can use authorship as an additional factor in calculating the worth of a page for a specific search.
Google can get a feel for what areas you are an expert in. First by just analyzing what your write about. But more importantly they will be able to use this extra layer of information to determine AuthorRank (similar idea to PageRank) by seeing links to your authored material.
Hopefully this can allow for RSS feeds by author (no matter where the content is published) eventually, if it doesn’t already.

Knowing authorship will allow Google to improve search result quality, so I can understand why they are pushing for it. It is a bit annoying how they keep pushing Google+ but this implementation seems tolerable. Some posts make it sound like you have to make your “authorship page” the Google+ profile, but really you can decide the authorship home page (for me johnhunter.com). They do pull your profile photo from Google+ to use, which is less than ideal.

WordPress: Multiple Blog Network on One Server – Overcoming Conflicts

Posted on March 5, 2012 by curiouscat

I ran into a problem when I added a second WordPress blog network to my server. I had the Curious Cat Blog Network up and running for quite some time with sub-domains for each individual blog in the network. WordPress automatically dealt with routing the sub-domains and having urls work. It really is very nice how easy it is to create a new blog and have everything up and running – just add it in WordPress, no need to touch the server directly. Blog networks are a new feature in WordPress 3.0 (I think) which are very nice. I would imagine it builds on effort with Wordpres MU but it is just part of regular WordPress now.

When I added the second blog network however the new faux-sub-domain that should be used affordable-funeral.moneyite.com would instead be redirected to curiouscatnetwork.com and since no such domain existed on curiouscatnetwork.com it gave the standard error message WordPress generates for the case where a sub-domain url is not recognized.

The main domain for the new site was working: moneyite.com. I tried searching around for some solutions to this problem online but couldn’t find any. I am not sure if multiple wordpress blog networks should work on the same server without any special needs. But it wouldn’t for me. I found a solution that did work so I will share what worked for me.

I created new sites-available records for each of the sub-domains and once you reload Apache everything seems to work. I am not sure their isn’t some problem with doing things this way that I haven’t uncovered yet. But it is working for me so I wanted to share this in case it can help anyone else trying to use multiple wordpress blog networks on one server.

WordPress error: Image could not be processed. Please go back and try again.

Posted on December 11, 2010 by curiouscat

If you get an error saying

Image could not be processed. Please go back and try again.

when you try to put a new custom header image for WordPress theme 2010 on a server using Ubuntu the following may help:

apt-get install php5-gd

once it installs then

invoke-rc.d apache2 restart

This will provide php the ability to manipulate images that WordPress is trying to use.

Code to Display text only on WordPress Blog Home Page

Posted on September 28, 2010 by curiouscat

Cut and past php code to determine if it is the wordpress blog home page (and only the home page itself).

<?php if (is_home() && !is_paged()): ?>

Example, to print john if it is a “homepage” templated page and jill otherwise:

<?php if (is_home(); ?>

<?php
  if($name == 'john'){
    echo 'Hi John';
  }else if($name == 'jill'){
    echo 'Hi Jill';
  }else{
    echo 'Hi';
}
?>

Checklist: Moving WordPress site to a New Host

Posted on September 6, 2010 by curiouscat

Checklist for moving an existing WordPress site to a new web host

A checklist for moving an existing WordPress site to a new VPS web host, when you have full admin rights over the server.

Set DNS TTL’s down to 5 minutes (a few days prior to the move). This will allow the nameserver update to propagate more quickly.
Set up new domain on the new host (Checklist for setting up a new domain on your VPS)
Install WordPress on new host
Copy old content directory to new WordPress host
Copy old database to new host (how to use secure copy to copy database to new server)
Update wp-config on new host
Enable mod_rewrite in Apache on the new server. From the command line:

a2enmod rewrite

Restart apache
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Test that everything works (you can change your host file to test things out easily)
Update registrar to point domain to the nameservers for the new host

If WordPress is up to date you could also just copy over everything for steps 1 and 2. I am using this for several sites I have had for years, I figure starting with a clean install of WordPress is a good idea, but it is not necessary.

Coding and Server Syntax Examples

Simple cut and paste code and cli syntax

Category Archives: Wordpress