What Happened to Google+ and Why the Question Still Comes Up

For several years, connecting a Google+ profile to a WordPress site through All in One SEO was standard practice. Publishers added authorship markup, linked their contributor profile and hoped for a author photo beside their search listings. Google shut the consumer version of Google+ down in April 2019 and removed authorship rich results long before that, yet the instruction still circulates in old tutorials. If you are searching for this today, what you actually need is the modern replacement: correctly configured social profile settings, sameAs markup and Knowledge Graph signals inside All in One SEO.

Let AAMAX.CO Modernise Your SEO Configuration

Outdated plugin settings quietly cost rankings, and this is exactly the kind of cleanup our team handles every week. At AAMAX.CO, a full service digital marketing company offering web development, digital marketing and SEO worldwide, we audit WordPress installations, remove deprecated authorship code, rebuild structured data and align your entity signals with the profiles Google actually reads today. If you want your brand represented accurately across search and AI answer engines, hire us for professional search engine optimization and we will configure All in One SEO properly, validate the markup and monitor the results.

Install and Prepare All in One SEO

Start with a current version of the plugin. From your WordPress dashboard, open Plugins, choose Add New, search for All in One SEO and install the latest release, or update if it is already present. Deprecated versions may still expose legacy Google+ fields that write invalid markup into your pages. Once activated, run the setup wizard and select the site category that matches your business, because the plugin uses that choice to decide whether your site should be represented as an Organisation or a Person in structured data. That single decision shapes all of your social profile output.

Configure the Social Networks Panel

Navigate to All in One SEO, then Social Networks, and open the Social Profiles tab. Here you will find fields for Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok and a set of additional URL slots. Enter the full canonical URL of every profile you genuinely control, and leave the rest blank rather than guessing. If you see a legacy Google+ field in an older installation, clear it. The plugin converts these entries into sameAs properties in your schema graph, which is how search engines associate a website with the accounts representing the same entity.

Set Person or Organisation Correctly

In the same panel you choose whether the site represents a person or an organisation. Consultants, freelancers and personal brands should select Person and pick the WordPress user whose profile carries the brand. Companies should select Organisation, add the legal name and upload a square logo of at least 112 by 112 pixels. This is the closest modern equivalent to old Google+ publisher linking. Getting it right helps Google build an accurate knowledge panel, which increasingly influences how brands are cited by AI powered answer engines as well as classic search results.

Add Author Profiles Where Authorship Used to Live

Authorship rich snippets are gone, but author signals still support credibility assessment. Edit each WordPress user profile and complete the biography, upload a recognisable avatar and add their professional social URLs. All in One SEO can output Person schema for post authors, connecting the article to a real, verifiable individual with a footprint elsewhere on the web. For sites publishing advice in finance, health, law or technology this is meaningful. Consistency matters most, so use the same name, image and role description across your site, LinkedIn and any professional directories.

Verify Social Meta Tags for Sharing

Open the Facebook and Twitter tabs inside Social Networks and enable Open Graph markup and Twitter card support. Set a default share image sized around 1200 by 630 pixels, choose Summary with Large Image as the default card type and confirm the plugin is pulling the featured image for individual posts. These tags do not directly change rankings, but they control how your pages appear when shared in Slack, LinkedIn or messaging apps. Better presentation increases click through and shares, which drives the engagement and links that do influence organic performance.

Remove Legacy Google+ Code From Your Theme

Plugin settings are only part of the job. Many older themes still contain hard coded rel="author" and rel="publisher" link tags pointing to Google+ URLs, plus dead sharing buttons loading scripts from a service that no longer exists. Search your theme header, functions file and any custom snippet plugins for these references and remove them. Dead external scripts add render blocking requests and slow your pages for no benefit. Always work in a staging environment or take a full backup before editing template files, and test the site afterwards.

Validate the Output and Keep It Current

After saving, view the page source of your homepage and a single post, then confirm your schema graph contains an Organisation or Person node with a clean sameAs array and no Google+ leftovers. Test the pages with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator to catch syntax errors. Then set a calendar reminder to review these settings twice a year. Platforms change, profiles get renamed and plugins update their schema output, so treating configuration as a living asset rather than a one time task protects your entity signals.

Final Thoughts

Connecting a Google+ profile is no longer possible, but the underlying goal has not changed: tell search engines exactly who publishes your content and which accounts belong to your brand. Configure the Social Networks panel in All in One SEO, choose the correct entity type, complete author profiles, enable social meta tags and strip out deprecated code. Handle these fundamentals and your brand will be represented accurately wherever your audience searches. For expert help modernising your entire setup, our specialists are one message away.