Last night, the SEO world was given a different look at how Publishership could affect websites rankings. Reported on several other SEO Blogs, travelstart.co.za began to display an authorship profile (see below). As you can see from my own blogs, tagging yourself as rel=”author” allows for your Google+ profile picture to be displayed in the Search Engine Rankings pages.

Ok, so authorship in a blog isn’t an uncommon thing these things, but what was different about this page was that it contained no Google Authorship Markup. What else became apparent was that there was also no Publishership Markup in their either. So how is this website displaying the Google+ Profile Picture?

It seem’s to be stemming from the Google+ page itself. Because you need to verify you own your website on your Google+ page first, Google could be drawing this information and using it to enhance their search results. Strange though that there is no Mark Up for Authorship or Publishership.

Apparently, shortly after getting noticed, Google pulled this feature from the search results and the website stopped displaying its Google+ profile picture in the results. So this was either a very strange bug in Google’s architecture, or this was Google testing something out.

What do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey