Trey Smith sent out an email stating how, “Google just dropped a BOMBSHELL foreshadowing the biggest change to getting your page listed in a decent position.”
Google’s newest thing is that they don’t want the web to be anonymous anymore. This is all part of Google profiles and Google plus being public. The new thing is to add a snippet if code to your theme that ties your site back to your Google profile and then your headshot appears to the right of your Google listing. The theory goes that anonymous sites will go down in rankings and Google profile sites will go up. Never before has your personal brand been so important.
According to Ryan T. Malone, the first of these tags is the rel=”author” tag. This tag is used only on a link to your “about” page on your blog. What this tag does is quite simple – it tells Google that this page is a page that is dedicated to the author, and is the most important page on your blog or website relating to the author. Quite simple, right?
The second of these tags is the rel=”me” tag. This tag should only ever be placed on your author page, and should only ever link to either a Google+ profile, or a standard Google profile. What this does is quite simple – it tells Google that the page that you are linking to is in fact the profile of the author. This is exactly where Google will pull its profile image from.
The code to use in your functions.php file to enable to use of relationship tags in posts is as follows:
function yoast_allow_rel() {
global $allowedtags;
$allowedtags['a']['rel'] = array ();
}
add_action( 'wp_loaded', 'yoast_allow_rel' );
This post was heavily influenced by information given by Joost De Valk on his blog – I give credit where it is due, and as an avid reader of his blog, I recommend his work to anyone who reads this blog. His original post on this topic can be found here.