It goes without saying that we love Google Authorship, and the snippets produced by having it set up.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s all you need to know in one photo:

Having this set up grabs peoples’ attention.

Part of the process of setting these up is to have a link on your pages back to your Google Plus profile. All the guidance from Google, and therefore most online sources, is to have an icon or short piece of text that links to your profile.

Not everyone wants to link to their Google+ page. And for good reason; a lot of website authors only have G+ accounts for the sake of getting these authorship snippets working. They certainly don’t want to drive visitors to a social profile they aren’t actively using.

Here’s a solution I worked out myself. As far as I know, I’m the first to be publishing this.

Simply drop this code into your website, anywhere at all. It doesn’t display anything on the site—it just sits in the code, but works 100% as a Google Author link.

<a href=”your-profile-url?rel=author” />

So for example mine is:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/1/110002801838494280534?rel=author” />

It’s that simple!