If you’re an author and decided to take the markup steps that Google+ announced a while back, your Google+ follower numbers are showing up next to your profile in Google search results.
In June, Google explained the new markup language this way:
We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.
A source confirmed that the next step of that feature, actually showing the number of Circles you’re in on Google+ in Google search results has been turned on.
The results look something like this, so if you’re searching for people or content on Google, you may spot this in the wild:
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If you’d like to add this information to your site or blog to have the number of Circles you’re in to show up in results too, Google has set up a help center area to give you a hand.
While this is great for authors, we think that most Google+ users would want to turn this on for themselves, so hopefully Google makes that a feature for all soon, without having to do any coding on a website.
Would you even want this information to appear in Google search results or would it creep you out? Let us know in the comments.
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