SEO with Pinterest

Michelle G Held

Working on SEO with Pinterest?

Yeah, me too. In the world of the ever elusive, sometimes evasive, always frustrating Google here’s what I’m working on this week: Author information in search results.

Google is working on displaying author information in search results. This is right from Google
“If you want your authorship information to appear in search results for the content you create, you’ll need a Google+ Profile with a good, recognizable head shot as your profile photo. Then, verify authorship of your content by associating it with your profile using either of the methods below.”
The take-away message here: Get rid of your cat, Godzilla or Sponge Bob profile photo pronto. According to Google, there are 2 ways to link your content. To use either of these, you must have a Google+ login.

OPTION 1: Link your content to your Google+ profile using a verified email address from the same domain as the content
This is for authors (I use this term loosely) that have an email address on the same domain as the content.

  • Make sure each article or post you publish on a domain has a clear byline identifying you as the author (for example, “By Michelle Held” or “Author: Michelle Held”).
  • In your Google+ account, go to Google’s Authorship page and submit your email address to the Google Gods. You only need to do this once per domain. Your email will appear in the< Contributor section of your Google+ profile. If you want to keep your email private, change the visibility of your link.

OPTION 2: Set up authorship by linking your content to your Google+ profile

This is for authors (still loose use here) that DO NOT have an email address on the same domain as their content.

  • Create a link to your Google+ profile from your webpage, blog or wherever you are posting like this:
    GoogleReplace [profile_url] with the your Google+ profile URL, like this:

    Here’s the link to my Google+ Profile:

    Your Name goes here

    Your link must contain the ?rel=author parameter. Change the super long, meaningless number, in this case “113581495885591734400” (have fun hacking away at my email!) to your Google+ login account number. Wrap the above anchor tag around your byline.

  • Go to Google+ and add a reciprocal link back from your profile to the site(s) you just updated.
  • Edit the Contributor To section.

  • In the dialogue box that pops up, click Add custom link, and then enter the website URL.
  • If you want, click the drop-down list to specify who can see the link.
  • Click Save.

If you want to see what data Google can extract from your page, use the structured data testing tool. So yes, I’ll be covering structured data next time.

So what’s this all have to do with Pinterest? The back links work there too! Here’s an example
http://pinterest.com/pin/395753885974714581/
This is useful because it helps you credit for your work posted on Pinterest and battle their number one issue, copyright violations.