Big note: Google authorship has been discontinued! We are keeping this post around for archival purposes.
Note: if you haven’t checked out Part I of our Tumblr SEO and marketing series, please do!
If you have anything to do with the internet marketing or SEO community, you know that authorship is the latest buzzword. To most people, authorship just means having the little face snippet in the search engines next to your post. In short, Authorship gives authors the chance to associate their content (blog posts, texts, images, and videos) with their profiles. It basically gives you credit for what you’ve done.
Tumblr fits right into this. Tumblr is a social platform where authors publish content, right? So why not associate your Tumblr blog with your main author account.
There are a number of benefits to implementing Authorship in a Tumblr, including:
- It can increase the CTR on your organic search results
- Author Stats – you can measure a number of different metrics such as CTR and impressions.
- PageRank – G+ pages do hold PR and this is always great for everything
- Visibility – it makes your content stand out
If you are looking to implement Authorship in your WordPress blog or another type of website, you can check out our Google Authorship Howto that will give you a full rundown on how to make it happen on your blog or website.
Getting Started with Tumblr Authorship
If you want to get Authorship set up on your Tumblr, it really only requires a few things:
- A Tumblr that you own
- Google+ account
- A smidgen of HTML knowledge
The Process
Navigate over to your Google+ profile and edit the links section (should be on the bottom right hand side in most cases). Click “edit” under the contributor section and add your Tumblr URL along with a label. Anything relevant will do for the label.
Once you are done with that, navigate to your Tumblr blog and hit “customize” on the top right hand section of your profile, assuming you are logged in.
Edit the HTML and find the <head> portion of the HTML of your Tumblr. Once you’ve located that you want to put this line of code into your Tumblr:
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/XXXXXXXXXXXXX" /> XXXXX = your Google+ profile ID.
It should look a little something like this once you are finished:
Save your changes and you are good to go!
The amount of time it really takes to “kick in” really varies on many different things. We’ve seen it take effect within 2 days or as long as a month (or sometimes never.) It really just depends.
As of lately, we are really starting to see a lot more Tumblr blogs in the SERP’s showing up, as opposed to 6 months ago when there were a lot less. That is just a personal observation, no data to back it up.
Please feel free to check out our other posts about Tumblr SEO that are very relevant to this topic:
An SEO’s Guide to Tumblr Marketing & Tumblr SEO
Tumblr SEO Part II: Google XML Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools
If you do have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section or send us an email via the contact page on our website.
Thanks!
Get Social!