With Google's recent algorithm updates it is even more important to get credit for original content creation online. Rather than comparing every page to every other page for duplicate content, Google is starting to use authorship attribution and snippet wars to determine who is likely to be the original content owner. There is a process of linking your Author Profile on your blog or membership site (AS profile in our case) to your Google+ profile using the parameter rel="me". Then in Google+ you can edit your profile and add a link to your blog profile (AS profile in our case) using the Contributor To option on the right side of your profile. Then in your actual blog posts you use the rel="author" attribute. Once you link all this together, your original content will also show your Google+ profile picture and have some other enhancements on a Search Engine Results Page.

So first I need to have Google+ profile available like Facebook and Twitter. Then I need to add the rel="me" attribute. It seems like there needs to be some abstracted way to add in other social accounts in AS since more are likely to come. But for now is there a way to get the Google+ link into my profile page?

I think I might investigate using XMod to render the social media links in the profile instead of the built in AS. Then I can add in custom fields into the DNN profile. This is working well for showing member badges with DNN roles / icons and XMod to filter / display.

The rel="author" has to be set in whatever blog / article tool you are using. I am using digArticle and was able to do all this on a non-AS site. I used the DNN Profile page as the Author page on the site and linked to that page with rel="author" in digArticle by changing the template. In the DNN profile biography is where I put in the Google+ link using rel="me".

Here are a few links.
http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/how...rel-author

The people I know who know the most about this seem to think it is very important. So take it for what it is worth.
http://seobraintrust.com/

Here is what I tried. I setup digArticle to add in the rel="author" tag to my links from my DisplayName to my AS profile. In Google+ I added a link to my AS profile page using the Contributor To option. Here is where I spent the most time. I tried to edit my DNN Biography that shows up in the Info tab on AS. For some reason the new CKEditor will NOT save the rel="me" tag. I have that working on another DNN install that uses another editor so I don't know why the CKEditor will not save it. It keeps changing it to just "me" or deleting it altogether.

So I went into my AS ProfileView.ascx and temporarily put a link to my Google+ profile. But I tried to test the snippet using the Google Webmaster tool and it kept saying it couldn't see the link. I realized I have my profiles set to Registered Users only. So I temporarily changed that to All Users and the attached image is what google showed in my test. So it did work. But still some kinks to work through. And I definitely have to be able to pull in the ASUID for the Google+ account instead of hardcoding it.

Testing Tool http://www.google.com/webmasters/to...chsnippets

Results below. I also added a sample image of a real search with resulting image and author attribution. Don't you agree that the author image catches your attention? Since he linked his Google+ profile you also see that people can +1 it in the search results and you see others who have +1'd it. This is going to be pretty important so we need to figure out a way to manage this effectively on our membership sites.

I still need to figure out a way to get this done. I was thinking I could replace the image for MySpace with G+ and just tell members for now to put their G+ profile in the MySpace link. But I tried to add in the Rel="me" into the active:link and it wouldn't display my profile. So I guess the active:link doesn't have the ability to process the rel="me" tag. It has the Target="_blank" in the active:link.

So is there any way I can edit the active:link to process the rel="me" tag and also change the UI to say Google+ instead of MySpace? I am about to have a lot of members blogging on my site and taking advantage of the Google Search Author Attribution will be very helpful.