It’s a matter of when not if when it comes to Google’s new algorithm changes regarding content ownership. Google Authorship is now vey much a reality.

Rich Snippets now allows you to add the following code into href tags:

rel="author" // rel="me"

This signals that the content is related to a certain author. You’ll then want to add further tags on your author page that shows Google who that particular author is. Let me give you an example from one of my sites:

Here’s an article written by me

You’ll see within the code I’ve added the rel="author" to the author name ‘tamgoose’. This link then takes you to a page that lists all my articles.

You’ll noticed within the code I’ve added rel="me" on my Google+ link. This shows Google that all these articles are mine. Now there’s just one step left to complete the circle…

You’ll need to add a link from G+ to your author page to do this, simply head over to your G+ profile and hit ‘edit profile’ at the bottom you’ll see ‘contributor to’ simply add your author link, in this case, http://enjoysports.co.uk/author/tamgoose and hit save.

Now to test you’ve done it correctly, head over to Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool and paste in your article/blog post URL and check for any error messages.

You’re all done! So to recap:

Link your article to your author page with rel="author"
Link your author page to your Google+ page with rel="me"
Link your Google+ page to your author page in the ‘contributor to’ section

Happy Snippets!