Does google authorship require a link to the persons google plus account? Or is that not the only way to do it?
Google authorship requires a piece of meta data (rel=author) on the published work that does sync back to the Google plus account.
Thoughts on whether bb press posts can be attributed to a given author for G Authorship purposes?
John
Right now bbPress doesn’t do anything with that.
It’s a good idea, but a plugin would need to be made to capture each users Google+ profile link (assuming there is one) and then put the stuff in the header as needed.
The following is what I use at AppGlobe:
/* Add Google+ profile URL as profile contact method */
function appglobe_add_google_profile( $contactmethods ) {
$contactmethods['google_profile_url'] = 'Google Profile URL';
return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter( 'user_contactmethods', 'appglobe_add_google_profile', 10, 1);
/* Remove nofollow, and ad author to the profile link */
function appglobe_switch_nofollow_for_author($str) {
$str = preg_replace(
'~<a ([^>]*)\s*(["|\']{1}\w*)\s*nofollow([^>]*)>~U',
'<a ${1}${2}${3}>', $str);
return str_replace(array(' rel=""', " rel=''"), 'rel=author', $str);
}
add_filter( 'bbp_get_topic_author_link', 'appglobe_switch_nofollow_for_author' );
And then in your user-profile.php (create a bbpress folder in your theme root, and copy it over) you can add this:
<?php if( bbp_get_displayed_user_field( 'google_profile_url' ) ) : ?>
<h2 class="author-subtitle">Google Profile</h2>
<?php if( bbp_get_user_role(bbp_get_displayed_user_id()) == 'bbp_keymaster' || bbp_get_user_role(bbp_get_displayed_user_id()) == 'bbp_moderator') : ?>
<a rel="me" class="bbp-user-url" href="<?php esc_url(bbp_displayed_user_field( 'google_profile_url' )); ?>"><?php bbp_displayed_user_field( 'google_profile_url' ); ?>
</a>
<?php else : ?>
<a rel="me nofollow" class="bbp-user-url" href="<?php esc_url(bbp_displayed_user_field( 'google_profile_url')); ?>"><?php bbp_displayed_user_field( 'google_profile_url'); ?>
</a>
<?php endif; ?>
Since I beleave only the first rel=me link on a page counts there would be best to use topic lead:
add_filter( 'bbp_show_lead_topic', '__return_true' );
…by doing so each page will be considered authored by the topic creator even if its paged.
That’s interesting, but not quite the approach he was asking about (from my understanding).
I think he was referring to the google rich snippets that show up if the page supports the appropriate meta (http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/)
You could use a good chunk of the code that is posted above (the part where it sets up a field for google+), then on topic pages get the topic user’s ID, and use that to put in the line above.
Yes thats what I’m referring to as well :-). It doesn’t matter if you use meta links in the head section ( <link rel=”author” …) or content links such as <a rel=”author”.
You can for example try my welcome topic at appglobe.com by searching google.com with the frase: appglobe.com welcome
…or you could try the google rich snippet tool for the welcome topic URL here: here
…but still there’s a problem with Google seeing only full pages as authored by an single author, not sections within a page( such as replies ), but they probably get to multi authored pages pretty soon
Of course the user has to add his G+ profile URL manually (so that the rel=”me” link points to his/her profile) for his picture to show up in SERPs, but having a rel=author in the links from topics or replies to his/her profile still makes sence.
If future versions of bbpress would start using more HTML5 each reply could be an <article/> element which would be more semantic for Google authorship.
But for now only one author for a page counts ( the first one ). Thats why I suggested using lead topics so that the topic creator get the authorship on paged topics.
Ah in that case, I think thats great. Since the author is the primary content creator of the thread, all things considering, I think it will work well.
You should considering polishing up that code and releasing it as a bbPress plugin on the WordPress.org plugin repository 🙂 You’d have to dynamically hook into the user edit page and maybe a few other changes, but the base of the work there is probably done.
I think I will do that, but what do mean by dynamically hooking into the user edit page?
Since I believe only the first rel=me link on a page counts there would be best to use topic lead:
add_filter( 'bbp_show_lead_topic', '__return_true' );
…by doing so each page will be considered authored by the topic creator even if its paged.
@martin_c You didn’t specify exactly where to put that.
I do not think it is worth spending time trying to get authorship credibility in forums. I noticed the problem of authorship failing to work on many of my forum pages, and stumbled across a debate in the google product forums: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/ms5VaHN3clo
This led to a post from the Google Webmaster Central blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2013/08/relauthor-frequently-asked-advanced.html
Whether you like it or not, Google does not want to apply authorship to forums. It is currently using the blunt approach of forum in the URL. If a URL contains the word forum, rel=author is ignored by google (with no explanation in the Rich Snippets Tool!). This means that any page describing forums or how to use them will not get credited at the moment. I suspect Google will improve it’s algorithms to try and identify forums in a better way, but it is unlikely to ever give credit for forum posts to a single person because it wants to recognize “The URL/page contains a single article […] by the same author.”
@shrewdies Thanks for that, nice read, will help on decision making for Microdata support in bbPress.
@netweb and @martin_c we’re still plagued by hatom which I believe started from our theme because we used shortcode from a page post.
Google search: Topic Tag: email | - Hosting-4-oscommerce.com The topic tag loop needs meta descriptions.
