: Could the rel="author" just be a username? I want to use rel="author", however the type of blog I run is about a game, and doesn't relate to my real identity. I'm more known for my screen

@Ogunnowo487

The link type author is defined in HTML5:


[…] the author keyword indicates that the referenced document provides further information about the author […]


So you can use any kind of URI that is "about" the author. This can be a personal website, a profile on a third party website (e.g. a social network profile or a gaming network profile), a page about a fictive/pseudonymous person, or even an email address.

That is from the specification perspective.

Now, what some third party services like search engines do or don’t do with this information is up to them.

Google seems to recognize only Google+ profiles, at least for now. So, if you have (and want to use) a pseudonymous Google+ profile, you can use it. If Google+ should block your profile, you won’t get penalized by Google Search for having used it with the author link type. Google Search will probably simply not display the authorship information anymore.

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@Voss4911412

As a safer approach, I would use a Google+ page (not profile) + rel="publisher" instead, it may not give the wished results (profile picture + number of +'s in search results), but could allow some other right side info to appear.

You may notice that all these bloggers that appear in search results have their real name and most often their real face photo in the search results, I don't remember ever seeing fakes without photos.

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@Bethany197

Doesn't matter. You should just use your Google+ profile URL anyway - i.e. <link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/profileid"> in your site header. You could also do this in an <a> tag somewhere on the page.

edit: as heytools noted however, using anything besides your real name on a Google+ profile constitutes a TOS violation. See here.

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