Well, I am finally getting around to claiming authorship for all of my various writings. I have been creating web pages and content for thirteen years now, so there is quite a pile of it out there. In the course of that, I have experimented with various website structures. One thing I tried was setting up subdomains within a domain.

I have always gone back and forth on the efficacy of domains as opposed to directories. Well, I suddenly discovered one way in which directories are superior to subdomains. In order to claim authorship through Google using the rel=”me” parameter in an anchor tag, the page linking to the author page must be within the same domain (not sub-domain) as the page linking to it and that is linked to from the author’s Google profile.

Re-reading the above paragraph, I realize this sounds a little confusing. It becomes clearer when we understand the system whereby the claim takes place.

1. There must be a link to an about or author page from an article page. That anchor tag must contain rel=”author”.
2. There must be a link from the author page to the Google profile page of the author containing rel=”me”. (This must be within the same domain as the article – not a subdomain.)
3. There must be a link in the contributor to column to the author page.

To check to see if you have done this correctly you can look at the Rich Snippet Testing Tool. If you screw up the result will look something like this: