Google+ Authorship: @REL, GET Parameters and Redirects

Question

I recently decided to start to take advantage of rich snippets to improve my personal website's content for the search engines and, IMHO most importantly, the site readers – hi, Mam! ;-). One of these are Google Authorship. Personally, I think the idea behind Google Authorship is a sound one: it helps to brings a sense of identity, personality and – arguably, most importantly – credibility to what is still largely an anonymous web.

Normally, I would link my article to Google Authorship using the following line of HTML:

<A REL="author" HREF="https://plus.google.com/112431363835029530079?rel=author">Jordan Clark</A>

However, in the instance of a website that publishes articles that are written by multiple authors, manually entering each another’s Google+ UID string starts to become a tiresome process.

1. Is is valid to do the following:

   (a) Link to the author like so, using the script "author.php" (or other type of server-side script).

   <A REL="author" HREF="/author.php?by=Alice&rel=author/[UID]?rel=author">Alice</A>

   (b) The file "author.php" scripts simply do a quick check for Alice's (or whoever) User ID string provided by Google, and then uses a simple HTTP redirect header to pass this data to Google.

   What I would like to know is:

   Is it okay to use a local script to redirect to your Google+ user profile? (i.e. will it affect the PageRank of already indexed page or have any other unforeseen negative effects on new and indexed pages?)

2. Why do I not see more people linking with Google’s “prettified” version:

   http://profiles.google.com/clarky.y2k?rel=author

   Are there any drawbacks to using the “prettified” version of this method?

Ideally, I would like to use the intermediate PHP script, as I have already described above (see part 1). However, any tips, suggestions or other ways you may have implemented on your websites are very welcome!

Answer 1

For item (1), you can maintain your own app's profiles (author.php in your case) for your authors. On your own app's profile page (author.php), you would add a link from that page to Google and specify the rel="me" attribute on that link. So Alice's profile page might say something like "<a href="https://plus.google.com/xxxxxxxxxxx" rel="me">Find Alice on Google+</a>.

This indirect authorship linking is supported. You also will need the link from Alice's Google+ profile that lists her as a contributor to your site. Once the linking is setup in both directions, authorship can start to show up. Authorship won't always display in all cases and can take some time for it to start appearing as Google would need to reindex your pages.

For item (2), I don't think the profiles URL will enable authorship. Some people use that URL as a vanity URL, but as far as I know it isn't supported for use with things like authorship, badges, etc.

Answer 2

You should test if your redirects are followed using the Rich Snippets Testing Tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Answer 3

rel="author" is no longer supported.