Google+ for Business was launched few days ago. Google+ Pages are the key feature of Google+ for business.

Now brand, company, institute, website, organization etc can create business pages in Google+ and use it to publish updates and information about their business/organization. You can create Google+ Pages to represent almost anything except a human. For human, you have to create a separate Google+ account and use it to socialize with friends. Impersonation is not allowed in Google+.

What is the purpose of rel=publisher meta tag?

Rel=publisher is an industry standard meta tag, used to mark which is the publishers official page (like Google+ page) for sharing official information. For example, in the official website of a business, they can include multiple rel=publisher meta tags, each one pointing to various social networking pages of that business.

Consider this blog ThoughtsFromGeeks.com. We have Pages in various social networks like Facebook, Google+ etc. So, we could have rel=publisher meta tags used in the home page of this website, pointing to each of the official Pages of this blog.

Syntax of rel=publisher meta tag

Here is the syntax of the rel=publisher tag:


<link href="URL" rel="publisher" />

In the above line, you have to replace the URL with the actual URL of the Page that represents your website.

The above line should be included within the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags in your HTML source. This meta tag tells the search engines and other indexing engines that the specified URL is the official Page of the publisher.

Alternate Syntax

If you do not want to use <LINK meta tag, but want to use a visible link to the Google+ page, you may use the following syntax:


<a href="URL" rel="publisher" />See us on Google+</a>

Google provides a tool to create a Google+ Page badge to use in your website to link your site to your Google+ page.

Consider this blog. Our official Google+ Page url is https://plus.google.com/110765327084239433544/

So, this is what we have in the html source of the home page of this site:


<link href="https://plus.google.com/110765327084239433544/" rel="publisher" />

By having the above line between the HEAD tags in our home page, we are telling search engines and other services that the official Page of our website is https://plus.google.com/110765327084239433544/.

What is the use of rel=publisher tag?

Even though rel=publisher meta tags existed for a while, it wasn't very popular until Google+ introduced the Google+ Pages feature and the Direct Connect Service.

The Direct Connect Service from Google allows business and brands to connect the official Google+ Page to the official website.

Rel=publisher meta tag plays a key role in connecting a website to the official Google+ Page. In order to tell search engines and other services that a website is connected to a Google+ Page, the website has to use the rel=publisher meta tag pointing the website to the Google+ Page and the Google+ page should have a reciprocal link back to the website using standard href tag.

Rel=Publisher meta tag: Syntax and Use

What is the purpose of rel=publisher meta tag?

Syntax of rel=publisher meta tag

What is the use of rel=publisher tag?

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