Solution To Why your Profile Picture Doesn't Show In Google Search?

Everyone including me finds it really exciting when they experiment something and then receive positive results. 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. I applied every single formula but succeeded with an extremely simple solution to the problem. You can see my Google+ profile picture appearing just fine in search results.  Or you can simply paste any of our blog post link in Google to see the result. This new feature is known as Google Authorship which is surely an excellent way of claiming the Authorship of your content in Google search results and also the best way to attract more and more traffic towards your blog.

What Is Causing The Profile Pic Not To Display?

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.

As you can see on many blogs the image is rectangular and it can not be automatically turned into a square thumbnail by Google robots because they know that doing this will badly destroy the image quality. To solve this problem I thought that resizing the image by giving it 128px by 128px in size and using JPEG format will make it easy for robots to detect a good match of author thumbnail and display a square thumbnail of my profile pic in search results.

 

Now Google robots can easily and automatically create the following quality thumbnail profile pic on all my published articles by resizing my original pic to 44px by 44px in size without affecting the quality.

How To Show Author Profile Picture Correctly?

The steps mentioned here are kept as easy as they could be because 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/103854977183845827762
• You can replace Join me on Google+ with any text you like. (Optional)

This is how the link looks on my blog:

     2.  Next add a attribute to your About Us Page just inside your blog anywhere you like. I have added this link to my blog footer using the following code:

<a rel="author" href="http://www.mybloggingtricks.com/p/about-author.html">About</a>

This is how it looks on the blog:

You can give it any title you like but add it either to sidebar or footer.

     3.  Now this is 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/103854977183845827762" title="Shahabuddin Danish">Danish</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  name instead of Danish.

     4.  Now go to your Google+ profile and click “Edit Profile”

     5.  Then click "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.


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.

Note: If you are using Blogger Profile then go to Blogger and Set the same image as your Blogger Profile Picture also.

     8.  In order to ping Google robots that you have updated your About Us page, you can also submit your about us page at http://blogsearch.google.com/ping because its better to submit your to Google for re-indexing. You can skip this step if your PageRank is 2.0 or above.

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

Test How your profile photo will appear

In order to see how your image will appear. Visit rich snippets tool and submit your homepage link in the search box and hit preview.

If you have followed the tutorial correctly then you will profile authorship will be verified. You will see a green verification message saying: "Verified: Authorship markup is verified for this page"

If you seem to be getting errors then revise the tutorial and retry and retest until you get no errors at all.

Need Help?

You are most welcomed to ask anything if not cleared. You are more then welcomed to post your queries. I wish that the profile pictures show up as easily as it did for me without needing to wait any longer.

Please share this post with all your loved ones to share the knowledge the way we did. This is the only favor we request in return. Peace and blessings pals! :)