In a blog post today, Google showed an example of how the profiles will be featured within Google News.

The journalist has to first have a Google account that’s linked to their articles, and when that’s the case, Google News will show the journalist’s Google account profile photo along with information about his/her from Google+ — how many followers and an “Add to circles” button. There’s also a link on the journalist’s name but, rather than linking to his/her primary website, the link points to the Google+ profile.

It’s very similar to the changes Google made last week to how it displays rel=author markup in regular Google.com search results, and I suspect it’s going to open up Google to more charges that it’s promoting its own services/properties in search results. (I’d bet that many journalists, not to mention their employers, would rather be featured with a link to their profile/author page on their main website, or perhaps even a link to their Twitter profile, for example. Google would likely argue that, Hey, we’re giving your name and face extra visibility that you didn’t have before; we’ll link wherever we want, thank you very much.)

Google says this change will roll out over the “next several weeks” and will only be available in English-language versions of Google News at first.

This makes sense, as Year 2011 for Google has been all about their multiple Panda algorithm updates, which favor higher quality content as a page ranking factor. If Google can identify authors who consistently produce high-quality content, wouldn’t that be useful in their quest to serve the best content in their search engine results pages (SERPs)?

Certainly this is a good development for writers.

How many authors out there would appreciate earning some institutional authority for their consistent excellence in writing?

Even if the online author gets a byline (and many good writers do not!), does a search robot even know to interpret an author’s byline as an indicator of their authorship? Or does it simply see a byline as just more text in an article, meaning nothing more than any other name dropped within an article (such as the subject of an interview or biography)? And even if it could interpret a byline as an author attribution, can a simply byline be trusted? Content scraper sites plagiarize good content every day – how much work is it to add a false byline?

Now that Google is now actively collecting author information, even advocating that authors take steps to associate their content with their online identities so that Google can establish an author-content connection, can we assume that one day authors might earn some level of authoritative status?

If so, that would affect the page rank of content they publish. And if this strategy succeeds in defining higher quality, more trustworthy content for Google SERPs, how long can Bing (and their search index proxy, Yahoo!) ignore this author attribution as a ranking factor?

Get In On The Action

To make this author attribution plan work, you need to create links, using the correct attributes, within a feedback link loop framework between your content and Google—specifically, your Google Profile page.

There are several ways to properly build this link circuit, all using Google-recommended methodologies (with even a touch of ambiguity for fun – but hey, it’s new functionality for them, and I presume the wrinkles will eventually be ironed out). Let’s get down to specifics here so you can start earning author credit for your work from Google.

Google Profile page

You need to start with your Google Profile page. You say you don’t have a Google Profile page? Think again. If you already have a Gmail account, use a Google product, or belong to Google+, then you’ve already got a Google Profile. If you are actually the last person on earth who does not yet have any accounts with Google, then you’ll need to create your Google Profile.

Go to the Google Profiles page, log in (or create your account), and start filling out your profile. Much of the content in the profile is superfluous to earning author credit, but pay close attention to the Links section on the About tab.

It’s here that you’ll want to create links to the Web content you authored, be it individual content pages, your authoritative biography page (such as an About Me page on your site or an About <author> biography page on a multi-contributor blog), or simply the home page of sites that host content you’ve authored.

You’ll also want to upload a good-quality head shot photo of yourself in the profile, as Google has already started using verified author data to associate an author’s Google Profile photo on SERPs containing links to content attributed to them.

Tip: Skip uploading cartoons, photos of your dog, or an abstract pieces of art for your profile image; only head shot photos are eligible for SERP thumbnails.

The photos that appear in the SERPs are linked back to your Google Profile, of course, so readers can learn more about you and find more of your expert content.

Google’s goal with this is to help humanize the Web, and by applying a human face (literally) to the links, they hope it builds trust in the linked content. At a minimum, authors can hope that this functionality will help writers earn credit for their good content when so often nefarious content scrapers republish copied content and search engines have trouble identifying its original source.

Content Pages

Once you have your Google Profile built and linked to your online content, you need to create links in your content pages back to your Google Profile.

This closed loop will associate the content pieces you wrote to you as their author. From anywhere on the pages containing your content (header, footer, nav bar, etc.), create a link to your Google Profile page that includes the data “rel=author”. There are multiple ways to do this. For example, you can add rel=author as a URL parameter, such as in this example:

<a href=”{YourGoogleProfileURL}?rel=author”>Google+</a>

Note that in this case, Google encourages you to use anchor text with a + at the end. The Google Webmaster Tools Help page Author information in search results specifically recommends it.

However, you can also add rel=author as a new attribute to the anchor tag. Doing so appears to negate the need for the + at the end of the anchor text, as the discussion of the process in another Google Webmaster Tools Help page, Authorship, completely ignores that earlier advice.

Indeed, per the YouTube video with Googlers Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson in which they explain the rel=author linking process as an anchor tag attribute, they advise that you can also use the Google+ logo button, your own photo, or simply your name (as Matt himself does) as the link text to your Google Profile, as shown in the example below:

<a href=”{YourGoogleProfileURL}” rel=”author”>Your Name</a>

Alternatively, if you’re not able to set up a direct link from the content page to your Google Profile (or if you already have a lot of content on that site), you can instead link the individual content pages to your author biography page in the same site using the same rel=author attribute, such as in the example below:

<a href=”http://www.xyz.com/{YourAuthorBiographyPageURL}” rel=”author”> Your Name</a>

However, if you take this last route, you’re not done yet. You still need to close the feedback loop to your Google Profile. You do that on your author biography page.

Author Biography Page

If you choose to point all of your content pages’ rel=author links to your author biography page on the same site, then simply create a link from anywhere on that author biography page to your Google Profile using the rel=me attribute, as shown in the example below:

<a href=”{YourGoogleProfileURL}” rel=”me”>Your Name</a>

Going this route means you then don’t need to link to every piece of individual content from your Google Profile. You can instead simply link out from your profile to your author biography page, which has inbound links using rel=author from all of your content on that site.

Confirm Your Changes

Once your changes are in place, Google suggests you go to their Rich Snippets Testing Tool to see what author data Google can pull from your newly marked up pages. Note that the tool only works with one URL at a time. You’ll need to run this test on each page you want examined.

That said, I also saw in a post Google linked to in their Authorship Help topic that you may need to wait for Google to enable this functionality for your site. Keep this caveat in mind as you check your pages in case you get unexpected results. Also note that the tool is in beta, so your mileage may vary, anyway.

Lastly, once you are done with the rel=author updates, go to the Google Authorship request form to let Google you are actively using this linking functionality.

The form states that they might get back to you with any implementation issues they discover. I don’t know if that will ever happen, but showing interest by actively participating in a program like this won’t likely hurt and may help you in your quest to be recognized as the author of your own content.

Benefits & Concerns

Ultimately, this is a nice strategy for Google. It helps them identify another content value criteria as a potential ranking factor (in the aforementioned YouTube video, Othar clearly states this is the long-term goal for this functionality). If an author writes consistently strong and valuable content, then that has value to Google’s customers, so it has value to them.

Not coincidently, it also requires the use of Google Profiles pages as the lynchpin for connecting authors to content. And if you sign up for Google+, which is a highly strategic product for Google in the social media war with Facebook, your profile page becomes a Plus Page! And of course, a deeply-detailed personal profile is a great and valuable tool for collecting all sorts of personal information about an individual. Of course, that data has enormous value, as it can be monetized.

The benefits to authors is still speculative as the introduction of rel=author functionality by Google is so new. However, the promising potential to existing, authoritative (not to mention well-linked and eagerly participating) content authors of automatically earning some degree of page rank lift for newly published content is compelling.

Who wouldn’t want to earn an edge for consistently doing hard, legitimate work?

Ultimately, we’ll need to see how well this linking technique is adopted by the webmaster and Web author community. It could offer genuine value to the producers of high-quality content Google is trying so hard to emphasize as of late.

It could also benefit searchers with higher quality, more trustworthy SERPs, and as a result, thereby benefit Google as well. But it could also go the way of Google Wave. As a content author myself, I really hope for the former.

Twitter & Verification

Let’s start with Twitter. Cast your mind back to June 2009. After growing complaints that it was hard to know who was real, including from celebrities tired of being impersonated, Twitter launched Verified Accounts.

These accounts all carry a blue checkmark symbol, a sign that Twitter vouches that the person or company using them really has been verified to be that person. You’ll see it to the right of William Shatner’s name, below:

Want to be verified? Good luck with that. The general public is out of luck. As ClickZ noted last October, Twitter quietly discontinued its public program. The page at Twitter about Verified Accounts says:

What kinds of accounts get verified?

Verification is used to establish authenticity for accounts who deal with identity confusion regularly on Twitter. Verified Accounts must be public and actively tweeting.

How do I get my account verified?

This program is currently closed to the public. This means we are not able to accept public requests for verification.

Why is the Beta verification program currently closed?

Twitter’s public beta version of account verification is no longer available. After a long period of manual testing, we’ve closed public applications. We have removed our public-facing verification request form. In the meantime, we’re still verifying some trusted sources, such as our advertisers and partners.

In short, if you’re a celebrity, and Twitter somehow takes notice, you get verified. Alternatively, if you’re a Twitter advertiser or partner, you get verified. Everyone else, stuff it.

Better Ways

It doesn’t have to be like this. Twitter could easily allow for everyone to be verified in a variety of ways. For one, it could use a system similar to how Google allows site owners to verify their accounts for Google Webmaster Central. Put some code on your site, and if Twitter sees it, then the Twitter account could be verified to that site.

That’s an incredibly easy way for anyone with a public-facing site to link the two. Indeed, Twitter’s own advice for those trying to show their accounts on Twitter are “real” is to do something similar, to link from their official sites to their Twitter accounts.

That’s good advice, but how about a little give back, Twitter? If people are linking over, why not come up with some type of “Site Verified” moniker?

Google Profiles & Verification

Twitter could also borrow another idea from Google, that of verified Google Profiles. Google allowed for profiles to have verified email addresses or “names” in a variety of ways, such as getting a PIN through your cell phone or using a credit card. This explains more:

• Hoping To Improve People Search, Google Launches “Profile Results”

I used to have both of these listed on my Google Profile, as this screenshot from April 2009 shows:

Google+ Broke Verification; Facebook Does Nothing

That was lost in the wake of Google+. Google, in its rush to “field trial” its invite-only Facebook rival, broke the verification of who knows how many people, regardless of whether they were in Google+ or not.

Meanwhile, we now have the irony that more celebrities are joining Google+, along with fake celebrities that are turning up, and Google’s apparently still figuring out how to handle them. Poor old William Shatner joined, only to have his profile closed temporarily.

Over at CNN, Mark Milian details this as part of good article that looks at some ways Google’s trying to resurrect verification. He also covers that when it comes to Facebook, there’s no real attempt at verification at all.

Get It Together, Social Networks!

The mess with Google+ is pretty absurd. It’s not 2007. It’s 2011, and launching a new social network without verification of celebrities, not to mention allowing for “brand pages,” simply doesn’t wash — field trial or not.

Then again, if Facebook doesn’t have it, perhaps that’s too harsh. But really, Facebook should gain some verification. I’d like to see that happen.

As for Google, it ought to fix what it broke with the old verification system, which would give mere mortals the ability to verify themselves, if they want. If Google wants to accelerate the process for the celebs coming online, that’s great — that’s useful to help avoid confusion. But the existing system they have and broke could be used to do that.

As for Twitter, same thing. Keep on verifying those celebrities that are coming online. We need that type of clarity. But tear down that verification wall and allow anyone an easy way to verify themselves, if they so choose.

The Facebook Factor

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the feature. But I think it has to be taken in context with Facebook’s recent accusations that Google has been somehow been secretly collecting information about people from Facebook and other social networks without their permission or their knowledge.

Examining Facebook’s “Smear Campaign” Concerns About Google Social Circles is our post from last month that goes into details about those accusations. In it, I covered how the information that Facebook was concerned about being “scraped” was itself actually being published onto the open web by Facebook itself.

How Google Knows About You

Still, it might not be clear to some Google users how something on a social network could end up being linked to them in Google results. The new tool, as Google explains in its blog post today, seems in part to help clarify that:

Your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you — whether a mention in a blog post, a photo tag or a reply to a public status update. When someone searches for your name on a search engine like Google, the results that appear are a combination of information you’ve posted and information published by others.

Nothing above is new. Our online identities, even before the rise of Facebook, were defined by material placed on the web either by ourselves or by others.

What’s the new tool exposing or helping with that’s different. Not much, except maybe giving Google more cover if people complain that it has found some info about them from a social network.

Google Profiles & Me On The Web

Let’s take a look at my own “Me On The Web” section:

On the left, there are a sample of links that are listed on my public profile page with Google.

Not everyone has a Google Profile page. You have to make one, and if you do, then only links you choose to add to them will be shown. Our article below explains more about this:

• Hoping To Improve People Search, Google Launches “Profile Results”
• Google Redesigns Google Profiles

In terms of “Me On The Web,” showing links from someone’s Google Profile may enlighten them little (if they haven’t added links to a profile) to nothing (if they have no profile) about who they are on the web. Plus, the links are focused on what an individual might be publishing, not what others might be publishing about that person.

Why bother showing this “links” area? For one, if you have created a Google Profile and linked up your various accounts, then it’s a little more obvious that you’ve alerted Google to those accounts. Despite them often already being public in various ways, this potentially makes it harder for another company like Facebook to suggest that Google has somehow stumbled upon your social profiles.

Pushing The Google Profiles

Another reason is that it helps promote Google Profiles themselves. After all, consider what you see if you do not have a Google Profile:

No profile? Then Google urges you to create one to “help control how you appear within Google search results.”

This is also advice that Google offers if you select that “How to manage your online identity” link that’s listed on the right side of the “Me On The Web” section:

The advantage of having a Google Profile? If you open that help topic, you’re told:

With a Google profile, you can manage the information–such as your bio, contact details, and other information about you–that people see. You can also link to other sites about you or created by you. For example, you can link to your blog, online photos in Picasa, and other profiles such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Yes, you can manage the information on that page. Having that page might give you an additional listing in Google’s top results, such as you see here in a search for Leo Laporte:

Potentially, if there’s something you don’t like in the top search results, that profile link — if it shows up — might “push” something negative into the second page of results, where it will be seen by fewer people.

Google Profiles Offer Little Help With Reputation Management

Of course, the negative stuff might appear above your Google Profile page. If so, nothing will get pushed out. You might not even see your Google Profile page appear at all for your name, even if you have one. Google’s incredibly inconsistent about if (and where) it shows Google Profile listings.

And if you’re US presidential candidate Rick Santorum, sorry, that Google Profile isn’t going to help at all with your reputation problem for searches on “santorum” on Google.

Google Profiles Help Google Know You

What Google Profiles will do is help Google better understand who you are as a Google account holder. That’s extremely helpful if you’re trying to make your search results be more socially relevant to searchers. If they have a profile and link that profile to their social accounts, then in turn, Google can better guess who their friends are.

Indeed, that’s exactly how Google Social Search works now. It depends in part on people having Google Profiles. No Google Profile? Then Google is more limited in how it can create socially-relevant search results. The articles below explain this in more depth:

• Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle”
• Google Social Search Goes Live, Adds New Features
• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”
• Examining Facebook’s “Smear Campaign” Concerns About Google Social Circles

From Google Profiles To Google +1

As for Google +1, it does NOT depend on Google Profiles to create connections. But in order to use Google +1, you have to have a Google Profile — and if you want to show your +1s publicly, you have to take a further step and enable the +1 tab on your Google Profile. This explains more about Google +1:

• Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button

Now that Google +1 buttons are now appearing on web sites, Google’s got even more incentive to get people using Google Profiles. They need them in order to use +1. And at some point, Google +1 will have to be improved or linked into a system that allows anyone to easily “follow” what others are +1′ing.

Many +1s are probably happening just within search results. How many are happening web sites at all — and why anyone would push them there seems to be a mystery. Do they just push buttons because people like to push buttons? Do they understand that pushing the buttons might possibly improve their search results?

Leaving nothing to chance, Demand Media’s eHow even tries to educate people about this, I noticed recently:

On some eHow pages like this one, a question mark symbol appearing next to the +1 button cleverly explains that using +1 is a way to signal a “stamp of approval” to Google for search purposes.

“Me On The Web” Another Social Tool?

Like I said, eventually, the +1 button needs to be hooked up into something that lets people follow what others are +1′ing. Earlier this week, MG Siegler wrote a nice piece at TechCrunch on this, on how the Google +1 button isn’t offering much of a treat to users.

I also covered this in my Has Facebook Become The Master Key To Unlocking The Web? story:

What’s the bribe for visitors? Twitter’s button makes it easy to share to friends and followers on Twitter. Facebook’s buttons make it easy to do the same on Facebook.

Google +1 promises to maybe improve my search results and to make a list of things I like if my friends choose to go to my profile page on a regular basis to check — and only if I’ve opened up my +1 tab.

That’s complicated and not particularly compelling. I think Google’s going to need to up the offer for visitors, to get the clicking started. If it doesn’t, it’ll only win half the battle. It’ll get space on sites, but it won’t get the valuable social sharing data it wants.

I think “Me on the Web” is part of Google enlisting Google Profiles into the battle with Facebook.

Of course, I also think Google’s trying to actually help educate people who view information that Google lists in it results somehow as information that Google “has” about them and want to control this. But I do think Google Profiles gets a boost in a new way, as part of this.

Removing Information & Alerts

Beyond the social networking aspects, Google’s “Me On The Web” does provide a link with information on how people can get content removed from Google’s listings. Don’t get your hopes up, however. This can only be done in very limited cases, and our articles below explore this in great depth:

• Removing Your Personal Information From Google
• Removing Pages From Google: A Comprehensive Guide For Content Owners

The area also brings greater awareness of Google Alerts, a way to monitor what people may be saying about you online. Google Alerts, they’re not just for Katy Perry, you know!

The “Set up search alerts for your data” link brings up a “Manage Personal Alerts” box:

That looks promising. It’ll even automatically search for your linked Google Gmail address, if you like.

But after hitting save, it doesn’t take you to the list of alerts you’ve created. If you use the link again, you’re also not shown previously created alerts. Nor does anything found appear in the “Me On The Web” dashboard area. You also don’t get the wider range of options that going directly to Google Alerts provides, such as to search just against news content.

Bottom line: if you want alerts about yourself, you’re probably better off going to Google Alerts directly.

Overall, maybe “Me On The Web” will develop into something more impressive. But right now, it seems less about telling you what Google knows about you from the web and more about helping Google understand who you are on the web.

Related Stories

• Hoping To Improve People Search, Google Launches “Profile Results”
• Google Redesigns Google Profiles
• Google Dashboard Offers New Privacy Controls
• Removing Your Personal Information From Google
• Removing Pages From Google: A Comprehensive Guide For Content Owners
• Examining Facebook’s “Smear Campaign” Concerns About Google Social Circles
• How Facebook Enables The Google Social “Scraping” It’s Upset About
• Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle”
• Google Social Search Goes Live, Adds New Features
• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”
• Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button
• It’s Here: Google +1 Buttons For Websites
• Has Facebook Become The Master Key To Unlocking The Web?

There are also reports tonight that Page has promoted a half-dozen Google execs to new senior vice president roles; more on that below.

SAI has published a screenshot that it says is an internal Google FAQ describing a “2011 Multiplier” affecting employee bonuses. The screenshot says, in part:

For Googlers on the Company Plan, the multiplier has both an upside and a downside. It can range from 0.75 to 1.25 depending on how well we perform against our strategy to integrate relationships, sharing and identity across our products. If we’re successful, your bonus could be up to 25% bigger. If not, your bonus could be as much as 25% less than target. We all have a stake in the success of this effort and this multiplier is designed to reflect that.

(emphasis is mine)

Google’s missteps in the social space are well documented. Google Wave has already been shuttered, and Google Buzz has caused the company a number of headaches … not to mention lawsuits. Google bought services like Jaiku and Dodgeball, but later closed both.

Last September, Google began talking about a new plan: a social layer across its products. That plan has started to be realized in recent weeks with the expansion of social signals on search results’ pages, and last week’s launch of Google +1.

Page hints at the importance of Google Profiles when he refers to “identity” in the quote above. Most, if not all, of Google’s social efforts are dependent on getting searchers to create Google Profiles – and the company has been improving, promoting and emphasizing those for a few years now.

But for more and more Internet users, profiles belong to Facebook. Facebook gets about 25% of all US page views and was the most visited US web site in 2010. And it’s not just a US thing. Just look at comScore’s 2010 Europe Digital Year in Review, which reported that Europeans spend more time on Facebook than Google and showed Facebook’s dominant position among social networking sites in more than a dozen countries.

So the big question might be this: Do users really want Google to be more social? Or has that ship already sailed? Google employees may get an answer in their Q4 bonus checks.

There’s more discussion of this on Techmeme.

Meanwhile, the LA Times is reporting that Page also completed a major overhaul of Google’s management structure today (Thursday). The Times reports the following promotions to new Senior VP status:

• Andy Rubin to senior vice president of mobile
• Vic Gundotra to senior vice president of social
• Sundar Pichai to senior vice president of Chrome
• Salar Kamangar to senior vice president of YouTube and video
• Alan Eustace to senior vice president of search
• Susan Wojcicki to senior vice president of ads

(Larry Page photo from Jakob Mosur. Used under Creative Commons license.)

Today, if you visit the connected accounts settings for your profile, Google offers a dropdown with six options: Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter and Yelp. But, as James Slater pointed out today, there are several additional social account options that appear to be hidden in Google’s system.

Slater noticed that each of the existing options is associated with an ID number, but those IDs range from 3 (Twitter) to 18 (Flickr) with several numbers not being used. MySpace is associated with ID=2, for example; Foursquare is ID=10 and Digg is associated with ID=11. Others Slater discovered include Hi5, Microsoft, AOL, Plaxo, Wretch and GitHub.

None of the IDs currently work for connecting those account types, so it may be something that Google’s still working on. Still, Slater wrote a Greasemonkey/Greasemetal script for Firefox/Chrome users that makes the hidden accounts visible. See his blog post for more on that.

But is any of this necessary?

Even though Google officially lets users connect only six accounts to a profile, you can still add other social profile links (or website links) via the “custom link” tool on the Edit Profile page. As you can see below, I’ve added links to my YouTube, Last.fm and Google Reader profiles this way — along with several other websites I’m involved in.

What’s unclear to me is the difference between connecting a social profile via the “Connect an Account” dropdown and adding a link via the “custom links” tool. Google’s profiles help doesn’t offer much explanation of that.

Google said the new profile design is “even easier for you to control and enrich your public profile.” Here are before and after pictures of my profile:

Before:

After:

As you can see, the profiles do look slicker and more “social,” as you would expect from a Facebook or Twitter design.

For more information on Google Profiles, see Hoping To Improve People Search, Google Launches “Profile Results” or the related stories below.

Related Stories

• Hoping To Improve People Search, Google Launches “Profile Results”
• Google Operators In Instant, Profiles In Navigation & AdWords URL On Description Line
• Google Social Search, Now With Google Buzz
• Google Unifying And Putting More Emphasis On “Profiles”

Yesterday I asked Google for a comment and received a friendly but anonymous response: “We do not comment on rumor or speculation.” Of course not. That almost certainly means that something is coming.

I told several people yesterday that it was probably a beefed up version of Google Profiles. And that’s almost certainly part of whatever will show up.

Google has teamed up with iPrint.com to offer free Google Profile business cards to the first 10,000 people who claim them. Each person can get a set of 25 cards that shows the Google.com home page with his/her Google Profile URL underneath it in green.

If you’re logged in to your Google account, you should see the offer available at the top of your profile. It can also be accessed here:

http://www.google.com/profiles/me/bizcards/

The offer is only available in the continental U.S., and Google says the cards should arrive within 10-12 days. You’ll have to create an iPrint.com account to place the order, or login to an existing account with them if you have one.

Postscript: Some have reported 404 errors trying to reach that page. It appears that you need to ensure your account is public, otherwise you’ll get an error.

Since the end of 2007, Google has allowed people to create Google Profile pages for use with certain Google services. For example, if you created content in Google Maps, your Google Profile let you share who you were with others using that service. The same profile also served to identify you when using the completely different Google Reader service.

Now Google Profiles are going beyond Google’s own services. They’re being promoted as a way for people to tell the world who they are and, to some degree, being offered as a way for people to claim their identity in Google’s main search results.

“People have no control over how they appear when other people search for them on Google. That’s a big issue we’ve heard,” said Joe Kraus, a director of product management at Google. “The new results are to better control what people see and improve the ability for people to fine what they’re looking for.”

In the new system, a new “Profile results” section will appear at the bottom of a Google search page, when it finds a strong match in response to a name-based search. Up to four profiles will be shown:

You can also search directly for profiles here.

Building Your Profile Page

The profiles all come from Google Profile pages, which means in order for a chance to appear, you’ve got to have a page. That’s fairly easy. There’s no charge to have a page, and you needn’t use any particular Google services, either. Just sign-up here. You can also search for “me” on Google, and if you’re signed-in, you’ll see an option promoting how to make your own profile.

After signing-up, you can provide a variety of information about yourself, including:

• Your picture
• Your first and/or last name
• Nickname
• Where you grew up
• Where you live
• Where you work
• Schools you’ve attended
• A biography
• Links to web sites you wish to list
• Pictures from your Picasa, Flickr or other online photo albums
• Contact information, which can be shared selectively with people

Not all of these options were offered when Profile pages were first launched. The pages have gained more features over time, and the new additions have been pretty poorly communicated, I’d say. If you’re like me, you’ve probably had a fairly bare display.

The new system will cause many people to reexamine their profiles, as they hope to appear in Google’s main results. But with only four spaces, some names will be competitive. Which ones will show? Those that Google feels are “comprehensive enough,” Kraus said.

Does that mean you need to fill out all the fields, including what your “superpower” is? No. Kraus said there are no hard-and-fast rules, especially since the system’s ranking criteria are likely to change over time. But for now, those who at least fill out the form with their first and last name (this is the basic requirement), along with a few links to content, will probably increase the odds of appearing.

Profile Page Options: From Job Title To Links

As an example of what you can do, here’s my profile, which until yesterday had only consisted of my photo, my name and a few links. I’ve pimped it up since then:

Below, you can see how information in my profile’s “What I do” box gets combined with the “Current Company” box to form a job title below my name. Under that, the “Where I live now” box is used to show my location. All this is done using the Edit Profile option:

Whatever you put in these boxes will appear. There’s no attempt to verify that you really do have a job title that you claim to hold or that you work for a particular company. However, there is an option for others to report profiles that they feel are inappropriate.

As for my biography, I used the “Short bio” box to enter what I wanted to appear. This box even allows you to add links to your bio:

For those wondering, so far, these appear to be straight links that do pass PageRank. The nofollow attribute is not used, nor do I see other blocking, so potentially anyone can use their Google profile for link building efforts. I suspect that nofollow will come down the line.

Speaking of links, you’ll notice that in the upper right-hand corner of my profile are several links I’ve listed. These are added using the Links area of your edit profile page:

You can add any links you like. However, Google will also suggest some for you. Sometimes it can tell from information you’ve entered what links might be related to you, using the Google Social Graph. Or enter your FriendFeed link, and it will suggest other services you’ve told FriendFeed about.

As mentioned, you can also add a photo strip to your profile, pulling in pictures from public albums on Google’s Picasa, Yahoo’s Flickr or any URL that provides a photo feed. Just use the Photos tab to do this.

Verified Names & Emails

Now let’s look at two special things showing on my profile, that I have a “Verified name” and a “Verified email,” as shown below:

Don’t go looking on your profile page for the option on how to verify your name. It’s not there. Instead, to have a verified name, you need to enroll in the Google Knol service and verify your name there. If you’ve done that, you get a verified name. If not, you don’t.

It’s crazy, but it’s also a symptom of how piecemeal Google’s entire profile system feels to have developed over the past year. It’s as if Google drove its social networking car out onto the racetrack back in 2007 to chase after Facebook but kept adding parts to it during the race, without stopping.

Should you get a verified name? Right now, it doesn’t influence whether your profile will rank better in profile results. But if you’re trying to convince people to trust that the page is really controlled by you, it probably makes sense.

Then there’s the verified email. The idea here is that you’ve shown Google that you can send email from a given domain. For example, if you claimed to work for Microsoft, the system allows you to prove that you’ve received email from an address at microsoft.com. Or as the help page says:

When people who know you visit your profile and see, for example, your school’s domain name, they’ll be able to know that it’s the real you on your profile.

As for those who only have email from a free service, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or even Google’s own Gmail, they’re out of luck. These services aren’t seen as trustworthy enough to allow for verification.

While I understand that concern, I also find it odd. If many people start having verified email addresses, then it suggests those who don’t have profiles with verified emails are somehow less trustworthy. And since the entire Profile results system is designed in part to help those with less “net presence,” as Kraus called it, to have a shot of appearing in Google’s results, it’s unfortunate they get discriminated in this way.

Of course, as with verified names, verified email addresses don’t mean you’ll rank better. Those unverified folks have just as good of chance of coming up as the verified people. It just from a perception standpoint, they might have profiles that seem less trustworthy.

Vanity URLs For Profiles

Your profile is a web page, and that means it has its own URL. By default, your URL will be a long string of numbers. For example, my profile is here:

http://www.google.com/profiles/113217924531763968801

Of course, last week there was a great flurry when it was noted that Google started allowing profiles to have “vanity URLs.” Want a URL that uses your own name? You can have it.

Sort of.

It turns out that vanity URL must be the same as your Gmail address. In other words, whatever your address is on Gmail, that’s going to be your address in your vanity URL. If my Gmail address began emperorzorg, then I’d have a vanity URL that looked like this:

google.com/profiles/emperorzorg

Oh joy. If you have a Gmail account, and you claim your vanity URL, then you expose you email address to the world. Google explicitly warns you that this can happen, but it’s still pretty sucky. Why not operate the way that Google’s YouTube does or Yahoo’s Flickr, where you can have a username that is different than your email address?

Kraus said that Google is trying to have a unified namespace, where everyone has one name with Google and things are kept as simple as possible. That means using your Gmail name as your profile’s URL.

But wait! Life certainly isn’t so simple at Google. I actually have at least two active Google accounts, one of which isn’t linked to Gmail at all. I think I got that one by signing up for AdWords or some other service before Gmail existed. I’m also far from the only person in this situation, given I’ve seen ample Google help pages over time on how to transfer a particular service between different Google accounts.

And that non-Gmail account? The good news is that I can use that to get a vanity URL of my choosing. That’s right. Any Google Account not linked with Gmail can set the URL to whatever name they want, assuming that name is free.

Of course, this means that if you have an existing account, you’d have to find a way to move some of your services over to the new one (not always easy or even possible). You might also find the name you want isn’t free. And behind the scenes, if you ever do get a Gmail account? Whatever name you picked will be your Gmail address, Kraus said.

Clearly I’m grumpy over all this. I wish Google had let people pick whatever names they wanted for their URLs and kept it separate from Gmail addresses. But that’s how things are.

Choosing What To Reveal

Unlike with Facebook, there’s no granular control over what you share with the world on your profile. If you list where you grew up, everyone will see that rather than you selectively deciding to share it with just friends or family. It’s all or nothing. So don’t put anything on your page that you’re not comfortable sharing — which is easy, since nothing other than your first and last name is required to show up in search results.

An exception to sharing relates to Contact Info. This is an area where you can list your email addresses, street addresses, phone numbers, IM addresses and your birthday. You can selectively decide which of your friends to share this information with, and you can create groups of friends.

How’s all this play out in the Google-Facebook saga? With most of Facebook’s searches being people-oriented, is this Google trying to take on Facebook in the people search space?

“We already are a people search engine, in that people search for people all the time on Google, so we’re trying to improve it,” Kraus said.

True enough. And the change should be welcomed by many. I’ve regularly gotten email from people wondering how they could show up better for their names, especially in cases where there’s unflattering information about them. Yahoo was recently sued in one case. Personal reputation management is an entirely different issue — but even in those cases, there’s a core of the person wanting to be able to speak for themselves in the search results. The Google Profile results offer a new opportunity for this to happen.

For more, see related discussion on Techmeme.