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One of the most useful parts of Google’s new Rich Snippet system is called Authorship information. This particular snippet of information adds information about yourself as an author and gives your Google listings a significant visual boost in an otherwise boring list of search results.
Authorship info gives you a couple of important advantages on Google. The first is that you get a significant visual boost in the rankings. As you can see from the screenshot below, the eye actually snaps to the CSS-Tricks listing despite being the 4th one down (on this particular search). In my searches for help with CSS, I’ve actually started clicking on the CSS-Tricks listings almost exclusively because I trust the source and it’s a lot faster to find in the results.
The second advantage is that you will get a slight boost in rankings over time due to the increased click-through-rate (CTR). Since your listing is easier to see, more people will click on it, which leads to an increased trustworthiness.
The only disadvantage of authorship is that it requires you to have a Google+ account, since it pulls the image from there as your authorship image.
You have two ways of adding authorship to your website, the first being to add a snippet of code into your header with your Google+ URL. The snippet will look something like this:
<link rel=”author” href=”[your Google+ Profile URL]”>
The second method requires you to have a an email address from the domain you are claiming authorship for. Once you have an email account with your domain, mention explicitly that you are the author of the article (most blogs do this right after each blog). Once both of those steps are completed, submit your information here: https://plus.google.com/authorship to complete.
Claiming authorship is an easy way to gain a leg up on your competition and will be a lasting way for people to easily find you website. It’s well worth the 5 minutes it will take to setup!