To Display Your Picture In Google Search Results

Solution To Display Your Profile Picture In Google Search Results

Its really exciting when you experiment and receive positive results. For the past few weeks I had been experimenting to find reasons on why author profile picture is not displaying in Google search results page for some web owners/bloggers whilst on contrary Google+ thumbnail images are appearing just fine for others. I applied every single formula to find a valid answer but succeeded just today with an extremely simple solution to the problem. You can see my Google+ profile picture appearing just fine in search results. Just write blogger tricks in Google and you will see the profile picture appearing to the left of  blog title and description snippet text and my full name appearing just below blog URL. Or you can simply paste any of our blog post link in Google to see the result. This feature is called authorship which is an excellent way of claiming authorship of your content on Google search pages and best way to attract more traffic.

Note: The profile picture was detected just today for this blog therefore the pic is showing up for most of the posts except some posts where it does not display. It will take one more day hopefully for Google to display it for every single page. 

What Is Causing The Profile Pic Not To Display?

I wrote a detailed tutorial on this topic earlier and there were few points that needs to be corrected. The reason why author picture is not displaying for most of the websites is  because of unbalanced image size ratio of the profile pic. Google correctly displays a thumbnail image only if it has equal width and height dimensions.

To solve this problem I resized my image by giving it 128px by 128px in size and using JPEG format. Only this slight change made it easy for robots to detect a good match of author thumbnail and display a square thumbnail of my profile pic in search results. 

Google now automatically creates the following quality thumbnail profile pic on all my published articles by resizing my original pic to 44px by 44px in size. 

How To Show Author Profile Picture Correctly?

The steps mentioned here are mostly similar to my first published tutorial but here we will share a more correct approach. This is what you need to do:

1.First add your Google Plus Profile link anywhere on your blog sidebar using the following code:

<a href="Google Plus profile Link"
rel="author" target="_blank"> Join me on Google+</a>

rel="author" will tell robots that you are the actual author of the blog. Make these changes:

• Replace Google Plus profile Link  with your profile link. Example my link looks like:https://plus.google.com/107682531711784603706
• You can replace Join me on Google+ with any text you like. (Optional)

2.     Next add a Link to your About Us Page just below your blog footer or anywhere you like. 

<a rel="author" href="http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2008/06/something-about-me.html">About</a>

3.  Now the most important part. Inside your About Page add your profile pic with dimensions 128px by 128px in size and using JPEG format. Also start the first line of the paragraph with your Google plus profile link using the following code:

<a rel="me" href= https://plus.google.com/107682531711784603706 title="Ramakrishna Ch">Ramakrishna</a>

Here rel="me" will again further authenticate you as the original owner of the blog. Remember to add your full name next to title  and add your Google+ profile link instead of my profile link and  your first name instead of Ramakrishna

4.      Now go to your G+ profile and click the “Edit Profile” button

5.       Then click on the "LINKS" area as shown below,

Add your Blog homepage URL and also the URL of your About Us page. You can also add your Facebook and twitter links if you wish. I have observed that now Google offers two link options. One is called Other Profiles and second is called Recommended links. Add your Homepage link, Facebook and twitter links to Other Profiles  and About Us Page link toRecommended links.

Next you must do this:

• Go to http://profiles.google.com/me/plusones.
• Click Edit Profile.
• Check the Show this tab on my profile checkbox.

6.   One Final step is to Upload a quality Profile Pic of yourself on Google Plus. Your image will look best if it is 150px by 150px in size or you can use the same 128px by 128px  size profile pic that you added to your blog about page.

7.   Finally Save your profile and you are all done!

Wait for at most two days and you will see your profile picture appearing just perfectly in Google search results, giving a professional and pro touch to your little blog. :)