G+ and authorship - personal profile vs publisher page?

[mihomes]

So since G+ came about I have been making a 'page' for all of my websites. I link to the G+ page in the footer of each page of the site using the rel=publisher method.

With all of the changes with Google lately I think it is important to take credit for my pages using the rel=author. Now, rather than use my own personal profile I think it would make more sense to use the website's G+ page I have created.

Is it possible to use the same G+ page as publisher and author? Is it recommened to use the 'company page' as the author rather than my own personal profile? It just makes more sense for the 'company' to take credit for the authorship of the pages rather than me personally - or at least this is how I want to do it.

Opinions? I looked around a bit earlier, but it seems as though everything points to an actual personal profile for authorship rather than using a company or brand page one has setup.

[klark0]

From a goolgler:

At the moment, only a "person" (eg Google Profile) can be an author

[productforums.google.com...]

He said "at the moment" several months ago, but from what I can tell ..it's still true.

With rel=publisher the company is already taking credit for the article (and the whole site). Authorship let's you credit the person that works for or is affiliated with the publisher. So they are similar but different and can be used together.

[mihomes]

I just tried using the following in the head section of a page :

<link href="https://plus.google.com/yourid" rel="author" />

Mind you that in the footer I also link to the g+ page with a rel=publisher as well as link my Facebook and Twitter accounts for the site as well.

Here is what was returned when using the rich snippets tool :

author
linked author profile = [plus.google.com...]
google profile = [plus.google.com...]
author name = Widgets .
Verified: Authorship markup is verified for this page.
Please note that this does not guarantee that your profile will be shown in search results.

author
linked author profile = http://twitter.com/yourid

publisher
linked Google+ page = [plus.google.com...]
Verified: Publisher markup is verified for this page.

From the above results it appears there is no problem using a page as an author nor using it for both author and publisher on the same page.

Now, does this conform to Google and will this end up biting me somehow is the question?
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:37 am (utc) on Sep 5, 2012]
[edit reason] delinked twitter example url [/edit]

[mihomes]

I should also add it is interesting to see it picked up the twitter link as an author... again, could this screw something up as now there are two authors shown even though they are the same authority?

From what I gathered the publisher simply says you ARE the publisher while the author says you are taking ownership of the actual 'article'. For instance if you had a blog site you would be the publisher, but perhaps some of the posts would be articles from other authors where this would come into play.

[klark0]

Yep it will verify and even pickup twitter, but neither of them will appear in SERPs.

[jetteroheller]

Attention!

The form
<link rel="publisher" href="https://plus.google.com/NNNNNN" />


DOES NOT WORK

I made all this author links in this style maybe one year ago.
When I looked last week in my webmaster pages from this author,
there had been only my Google PLUS

So I put on all my pages a Google Plus Icon and used

<a href="https://plus.google.com/NNNNN?rel=author" />

Now all this pages show up in the webmaster tools.

The first method is also not longer listed at Google
[support.google.com...]

[lucy24]

They think they've found a clever way to force you to update your www pages every five minutes because you have to change them anyway to keep up with the Preferred Format Du Jour for author credit.

Won't work. I shoved it into an Include file ages ago.

Neener-neener.