Google+ Authorship, Rich Snippits and Three Names - a Problem?
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Hello All,
I have a conundrum that I thought I'd resolved - but that's popped its gnarly old head over the parapet again.
I have a number of websites that I'd like to have show my ugly Google+ mug as author in the Google SERPS. I jumped through all the authorship verification hoops that Google threw at me and I thought I'd won.
The problem? I have three names: Nick Beresford-Davies.
One example of a page that I'm trying to achieve authorship with is: http://www.graphic-design-employment.com/illustrator-how-to-make-a-pattern.html
I have verified authorship of the above website on my Google Profile:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/107765436751760696335/aboutOriginally I footed the page with Nick Beresford-Davies (hyphenated) and the Structured Data Testing Tool ignored the hyphen and just saw Nick Beresford. So I tweaked my online name (to please Google!) to Nick Beresford Davies (no hyphen). Initially this seemed to work - but I just checked again and now Google, for reasons only known to itself, sees "nick davies" as the author, completely ignoring the name in the footer of the page (by Nick Beresford Davies) and the fact that the site has been verified by Google+. This is also the case for all other websites that I contribute to - and not all the bylines are in the footer - some are by the headline.
When I test pages on the structured testing tool and enter my Google+ profile, it replies:
nick davies, we've found your name as one of the authors from the page. You can use "Authorship verification by email" method above to verify your authorship.Error: Author name found on the page and Google+ profile name do not match. Please consider adding markup to the site.Much as I would like to succeed on the Google SERPS, I draw the line at changing my name to keep this robot happy - so if anyone has any suggestions, or can see any obvious step that I've missed, I'd be very grateful. I find it hard to believe that no other double-barrelled website author exists - so I'm hoping I'm not the only one to have experienced this... Thanks!
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OK, so as so often happens, after asking a long, drawn-out question, I've gone off and found a working solution. Whereas when I originally tried it the "?rel-author" tag didn't work for me before, now it does. I'm ready and willing to accept that I'd done it wrong the first time around... but just in case anyone will find this ramble of any use whatsoever, here's what I did (as per Google's instructions):
- Add a G+ profile link to each article posted - such as [View Google+ Profile]([your Google+ profile address]?rel=author)
- Make sure that under the "Contributor to" section the root domain of the site is listed. You don't need to put in a link to the specific article - just the root domain.
- Test the link using the structured testing tool again - it should give a pretty much instant result, hopefully in the positive.
- Wish that you'd done this properly in the first place.
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