Optimizing your Author Profile in Google+ for better Google Results
Your Google Plus profile is used for much more that just the About page, it is also used by Google as your Author Profile. This is how Google knows what and where your contribute in the form of blogs, tweets, and other social networks. You can help Google get it right and find all of your content and correctly attribute to you by adding links and other details to your profile.
Google Plus Profile and Privacy Settings
You can see how your Google+ Profile would look in search results by visiting this link:
https://www.google.com/settings/privacy
Notice you have 3 links that show up underneath your name. This is a great way to market yourself or any other links of interest related to you or your company. However, which 3 links? How does Google choose?
Well…it’s sort of cryptic…
In Google+ there are 3 groups of links where you can add and edit in your profile: “Other profiles”, “Contributor to” and “Links”. Google grabs the first 3 of one of these groups links to show up, exactly as formatted, under your Profile. Mine is shown below:
It’s easy to add and edit links to each group, click on the group you want to edit, then just click and move the ones you want visible to the top of the list…but which list?
Well apparently Google uses the LAST edited list, besides the one you just saved. So if you move links around and change things in “Links”, it will use “Other profiles”. If you change “Other Profiles”, it will use “Links”.
Strange, and I am not sure this is implemented as Google intended but it is a quick way to show relevant websites to your author profile. To be safe I recommend having the first three links on all 3 of your lists important ones you would want to show up on your profile.
Also, don’t forget to make those links public or they wont show up!
