I am confused on adding Google+ authorship markup to a multiauthor WP blog

[DianeDP]

The blog for a client is at http://blog.multiview.com . I am not sure how to tell them to add Google+ authorship tags to the site, and link the posts to the individual G+ profiles of each individual author. One source shows it is highly complex, seesee http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-google-authorship-markup-123218  However, in the Google webmaster account, there is a real simple explanation, i.e. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2539557?hl=en Considering that this is an area that is very murky for me, is one of these directives out of date? Is one preferable? How complicated would that be, for this particular blog?

[GPainter]

Hi there,

It can seem a bit daunting but essentially what you want to do is this (the simple form)

1. Link the authors Google+ account with the site (contribute to X site)
2. On each post the author writes  you want the authorship tag going to their profile  or/as well as a physical link like "follow X author on their Link Google plus account" etc. that  helps tell Google the author

If you're not sure, you can test the whole thing here - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

This links seems to be the right way to go - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2539557?hl=en if you want it a bit more step by step

Hope that helps.

[diywm]

If you do what is suggested in the second link you give, that will work but is a manual process.

Not every page that someone authors should be included as an authored page - only the good, high quality articles so doing it manually is a way to ensure you only cherry pick the best content to claim authorship for.

If you use a plugin, you can end up linking back from everything whether you like it or not.  Apart from only claiming authorship for your best content  I think it is better to link back to your author page and then link once (per author) back to the Google profile.   We created a WordPress plugin that does this called AuthorSure.  It is used by a lot of multi-author blogs and gives you granularity of control over what you link to. If you happen to use WordPress and want a plugin solution it is the best one I know of ;-).

[B2B.CFO]

We use the All in One SEO plugin which allows us to add the Google Plus profile URL for each user. Then we go to the Google Plus user page and the blog as a place they contribute to.

It seems to work pretty well for us.