Google respects your Authorship


I’ve been an advocate of using [Google Authorship markup](https://plus.google.com/authorship) for a [good while now](http://www.onemanandhisblog.com/archives/2011/08/birth_of_the_authorship.html), but your success or failure was a hidden thing – the closest you could get to finding out if Google was registering your pages for Authorship was using the [Structured Data Testing Tool](http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets) and checking if it recognised your markup. 

Now, it appears that Google is actually sending out e-mails acknowledging the success of your markup. That’s good to know. 

I still advocate that all serious online publishers look into this. It both gives you some measure of protection from stolen content ranking higher than you and, in my experience, greater click-throughs from search.