Google+ has added two really interesting developments today: Embedded Posts and Author Attribution. The announcement comes via the Google+ Developers Blog, the enhancements are designed to help authors get the credit for their work that they deserve, as well as expand their audience on Google and across the web.
Embedded Posts
An embedded post is when someone takes a specific post on a social network and embeds it into their blog or webpage, allowing their visitors to see that post right within the site, rather than link them away to it. While authors and content creators will often use this technique to display a tweet or video that helps illustrate their point, the real value to businesses is when you can get other content creators to embed your social media posts. And now that feature is available for all of your Google+ activity.
To encourage it, you don’t have to do anything with your account. Simply continue to create and share interesting posts. Anyone can embed them if they want to.
If you want to embed a post yourself, simply go to that post and click on the down arrow in the upper right corner to reveal the post menu. Select Embed Post and a pop-up will provide embed code to use – a snippet of Javascript and a line of code to insert into your page. The result looks like this:
Note that it requires inserting HTML code, including Javascript, so you will need to shift to HTML view to insert the code, and you may need to disable certain filters within your CMS to get the code to remain and work.
Author Attribution
Google Authorship is topic we’ve discussed before. What Google wants to do is make sure that both Google and Google users understand who the author of a specific piece of content is. When that information is known, and the content appears in search results, the author’s name and image appear next to the result listing and are linked to the author’s Google+ profile. Up until now, such a result required that the author placed their name as a byline on the actual content, linked to his or her Google+ profile, using the rel=author tag.
With today’s update, WordPress and Typepad users who are creating content can have their authorship automatically identified by using the Google+ Sign-in. In other words, instead of using Twitter or Facebook to sign into your account, use Google instead, and it won’t matter if you’ve set up Google Authorship or not. Google will link your content with your Google+ profile and display your author information with search results accordingly.
According to the announcement, more platforms will follow so that soon, wherever you’re using your Google+ account to log in, your author status will be automatically recognized.
If you have any questions or comments on these developments, please feel free to leave them below.