Add Google+ Authorship to Your Product Pages
With the release of Google’s new Authorship Markup, it is now possible to associate content with the Authors and People that created it. For eCommerce merchants this means your products can now be tagged with your Brand/Company Name and your Google+ Profile anytime someone shares or +1’s a product with your Authorship Markup on it.
Data collected by GlobalWebIndex, an Internet Analytics firm, shows that Google Plus is the world’s second largest social network with about 359 million active users1 and there is evidence that content tied to your Google+ Profile enhances your pages’ standing in Google Search Engine Results. Given the popularity Google+ and impact authorship has on search engine results it is important to make sure your brand, company, and products are all interconnected.
Nexternal clients have the ability to show authorship of products pages in their Online Store via an additional authorship tag. To activate this feature, you must link to your Online Store from a Google+ profile. To do this you must add http://YourDomainAlias to your Google+ Personal Profile Contributor parameter in (Google+/Profile/About/Links) section.
Once this is in place, enter your Google+ Personal Profile URL into your Order Management System via the Settings section / edit for Compatible Software / Social Media Tools – Preferences Link / Google Product Sharing / Google Profile URL box.
Note: Authorship is tied to a person, not an organization. Employees must add your Online Store URL / Domain Alias to the Contributor section of their personal Google+ Profile.
Merchants with large products catalogs should have multiple Employees/Users connect their Personal Google+ URL to their User Account inside the Order Management System / User section. That way all your products are not connected to just one Google+ Profile. Authors will then be tied to the users that created those specific pages.
Once you have completed these steps you can check to make sure this is working using the rich snippets testing tool from Google Webmaster Tools.
For more information visit: http://www.nexternal.com/updates/#826 or contact your dedicated account manager. For instructions on creating a Custom Google+ Profile URL like the one shown above visit: Google+ Support
1Data from: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-plus-is-outpacing-twitter-2013-5
Bobby Cintolo is a Senior Account Executive at Nexternal. Bobby is passionate about wine and he specializes in helping merchants increase their brand awareness using social media and mobile marketing tools.
