Google Plus Profiles: Muddying the Waters
As the administrator of Trusted Dealers’ Google+ page, I’ve been trained like one of Pavlov’s famous dogs to update it fairly regularly for branding reasons, despite my inherent dislike of G+ as a medium for, well, anything.
Despite my craven acceptance of the necessity of keeping it up to date, I’ve also noticed that Google are now making a correlation between my G+ profile and my ownership of the G+ page and the website itself. Here’s what I see when I search for ‘site:trusteddealers.co.uk’ right now – without being logged in or anything else.
It’s interesting in a minor way, as there are no rel author tags in the blog or other connections between it and my Google account – but buried away in my G+ profile is this, which I don’t even remember setting up:
Despite that, Google maintain that they won’t give you credit for a link between content and profile without you going round the houses and tagging up web properties.
This is something that patently I have never done. Instead, Google is inferring a connection between my profile and content because of other signals, such as my use of Webmaster Tools or the aforementioned ownership of the G+ page. In fact, the Google account I use for maintaining Trusted Dealers’ web properties is basically an empty shell and not even my ‘real’ Google profile anyway – just another login to maintain that allows me to keep my personal and ‘professional’ stuff in separate spheres.
I haven’t explored this is in any way, but if they’re being loose with it then it opens up scope for interesting things which you might fairly consider to be errors – like this example below, which credits David Whitehouse with authorship of Dave Naylor’s blog:
I know that Whitehouse works at Bronco with Dave and has probably been involved with setting up Webmaster Tools or G+ on his behalf, but it smacks a little of sloppiness for Google to then attribute Dave’s entire blog to Whitehouse!
As I said, I’ve not had chance to experiment further, but next up: can you claim credit for someone else’s work?
4 Responses to “Google Plus Profiles: Muddying the Waters”
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Interesting. I’m going to add myself as a contributor on a few sites (NYT, Guardian) as well as some sites that don’t have authorship markup
And I’m going to make myself the author of a tonne of erotic fiction blogs to make my life seem more interesting than it actually is
LOL good job Google…
Anthony set this up and got us all to add our contribution things to Google+, funny that it’s picked me – maybe Dave Naylor didn’t do his so it thinks I’m the most relevant?
I bet takeup on authorship tagging is *really* low so they’re playing around for proxies like GWT ownership and so on. It’s been like this for a couple of weeks now so it’s not just a ‘one day only’ kind of result. Maybe they see it as a good enough thing in most cases – although obviously it could create loads of trouble down the line as people move jobs.