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Avatar picture to deploy to search engines Google Rich Snippets
phreak
MVP
Hi everybody,
Vanilla displays 3 forms of microformats in Google search engine entries from what i know.
I couldn't really fetch the code lines from viewing through the source, where the magic happens but it extracts like this in Google.
n Comments - n Authors - Date Month
Did anyone of you experiment with the avatar picture to be shown in the search entries?
I'm still at the beginning, but loved to hear opinions on that.
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I had done some work to get this in, but google+ was actually quite new at the time. I do believe we need to do the following to get this working:
We have a google+ plugin in development, but halted development when we found that google+ has a read-only api.
Does the avatar picture just rely to Google+, i have seen Twitter Snippets also, and actually i thought it can be delivered by any system but that Google takes the right to choose which one to display.
I just want to drop this image in so everbody knows what we are talking about. Klick the picture to see it, the upload here doesn't show it in this view.
There's an article on how google does author info here. So you can post an avatar in two ways. I'll summarize them below.
Put your email on the post and do a bunch of stuff. This doesn't make sense for Vanilla because we don't want users to have to show their email address where bots can scrape them.
Add a rel=author link to your Google+ profile. This is the path we'd take, but from the article, authors also have to go onto Google+ and whitelist the forum they are posting to. This isn't that big of a deal for the owner of a site that is invested in that type of thing, but on a discussion forum there are many, many authors.
So as you can see, there isn't really a perfect solution out there. I'll also note, that Google has changed how this is done several times in the past year so I'm not sure if this information will be correct a year from now.