I love Google+ (a lot more than most people) so when my Google authorship stopped working I took it a little more personally than most people too. I couldn’t for the life of me work out what happened, it had been working fine for agers then when I checked it one day on http://smo.knowem.com/ (a site I had been recommended to check whether authorship was working) I saw the dreaded result – ‘authorship not found’. What really annoyed me was (because I work in the digital marketing industry) I had also set up Google authorship for a number of other people and theirs all worked! Everyone of them apart from mine.
Test
So I did a test and opened a brand new Google+ account and set up authorship on that to see if that worked and of course it did! But I didn’t want to accept defeat that easily after all the time I had spent building up my circles and original authorship.
The Answer – so I thought
I realised the only difference between my profile and the others was that I had personalised my Google+ URL. So with this in mind I did a bit of digging and checked other people I knew who had a personalised URL and checked it again on the KnowEm Social Media Optimizer and just like me their authorship wasn’t working… or was it?
New Revelation
It was then bought to my attention through a forum that Google have an official Google authorship checker themselves. When I tested both my personalised and unpersonalised URL both came up as having Google authorship. So in fact it was the KnowEm Social Media Optimizer Tool that wasn’t picking up authorship with the personalised URL even though I had it all along.
So the Morale of the Story is…
Use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool when checking your Google+ authorship as you may have it even if you think you don’t!