Is it still possible to render full-bleed previews with descriptions in Google+? - google-plus

I'm trying to get a full-bleed link preview as described in https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/article-rendering, so that my preview can display a description. I haven't been able to do so, and I haven't found any other posts that have descriptions present (besides interactive previews).
Does Google+ still support full-bleed previews with descriptions in them?

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Facebook SDK title, description, caption and image fields are deprecated

Upgrading the Android SDK from 4.21.1 to 4.22.0
Facebook SDK
The title, description, caption and image field of FBSDKShareLinkContent have been deprecated. Please take appropriate action to remove usage of them.
How to set Content title and description now? Can anyone suggest something to make it work.
Thanks in advance!
You can't, the Android-Sharing facebook documentation says:
When you implement sharing, your app should not pre-fill any content
to be shared. This is inconsistent with Facebook Platform Policy, see
Facebook Platform Policy, 2.3.
From Facebook Platform Policy
Don't prefill captions, comments, messages, or the user message parameter of posts with content a person or business didn’t create,
even if the person can edit or remove the content before sharing. You
may use our Share Dialogs to prefill a single hashtag in a post, but
don't prefill any content a person or business didn't create via the
API.
Answering my own question.
What I did is I just made an html page and passed the values in meta tag for the attributes "content", "description" and "title" dynamically and gave the url of html page in shareLinkContent > SetContentUrl method.
So when shared it automatically picked the values from that html page.
This Worked in my case.
Happy Coding..!

Getting list of allowable previewThumbnails for a google+ post with a link

We are trying to create a google+ post that contains a link. The link should have a preview thumbnail image that goes with it.
The api documentation says we just need to set the attachment.image.url to what we want the preview image to be, but it has to come from the set of allowable previewThumbnails. Here's the doc I'm referring to: https://developers.google.com/+/domains/api/activities
How can we get the set of allowable images?
This page: https://developers.google.com/+/domains/faq suggests that we must use an "activity preview request" to get the list, but the link in that page doesn't go somewhere that tells us how to do this.

Google+ Author Snippet Photo not showing in search

I have set up my google+ account with everything linked to my website, my website linking to Google+ as per instructions, but photo is not showing in search results, even though the google testing says all is fine.
My site is www.mikegeorgiades.com (Google+ link code in homepage).
My Google+ page is https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/105269586899946171489/+Mikegeorgiades-guitarist-for-hire
Is there any reason why the test would appear OK but not for real? Is there a lag? Thanks!
that can have multiple reasons:
On their help pages the Google guys wrote that "Your Google+ profile picture should be a good, recognisable head-shot". When you browse the web via Google’s search engine you probably see a lot of images which do not show “good, recognisable head-shots”. I think it belongs to Google whether the picture shows up or not.
Google Authorship does not work when you link to a Google+ business page instead of a real profile page.
You did not add a link back from your site to your Google+ page (see this help page (Option 2)).
Your author info is hidden to the public. Google don't like hidden stuff. Make sure that your reciprocal backlink is not hidden via CSS.
Very obvious: Your Google+ profile has no profile picture.
Your site is cached and the backlink is not yet integrated into the source code. Try to clear your cache.
Your backlink is missing the rel="author" attribute.
Your backlink is missing the ?rel=author attribute in the URL (ex. href="http://plus.google.com/u/0/123456789/?rel=author")
Check that your E-Mail Address (if added to your Google+ profile) is on the same domain as your content (read more about it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986)
Make sure that the byline of your content includes the same name as in your Google+ profile. For example: When your Google+ Profile is "John Doe" your byline has to be "By John Doe" and not "By Doe John" or anything else.
You have not submitted your E-Mail address via this page: http://plus.google.com/authorship
Your Google+ profile is not visible to the public.
Your Google+ profile has been excluded to the search (so no one can find you via Google`s search engine).
There are multiple authors on one page. Google always uses only the first author that has been mentioned on a page.
You did not add your website to "Contributor To" section (click here to do that now: http://plus.google.com/me/about/edit/co)
The "Contributor To" section is not visible to the public.
The Rich Snippet Testing Tool throws errors (even if they are not related to authorship)
Last but not least: Google just does not want to display your profile picture
Update 1: More reasons can be:
Some users said that it also won't work when your website was not confirmed as yours in Google Webmaster Tools.
Some said that they got it to work after adding the same URL in Google+ as in Google Webmaster tools (Within Google webmaster tools you can setup the preferred domain (www or non-www).)
I'm not working at Google but I think when the Rich Snippet Testing Tool shows your picture it should appear in search results after some days.
Update 2: One more:
You have deactivated the option that noone can find your picture in Googles search results. To solve this go to https://www.google.com/settings/plus and scroll down to the "Profile" section. Activate the checkbox beside "Help others discover my profile in search results." (in German this is: "Andere sollen mein Profil in Suchergebnissen finden können").
Update 3: One more:
John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst # Google) announced that in the near future Google will not longer show the profile picture in search results. Instead it will show up on Google News only. However the name will still show up on search results pages. Preview image can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986
I recently experienced my photo disappearing from the search results and I, too, verified that everything else was correct under the structured data testing tool. At first my photo snippet was showing in the SERP but then it vanished. I was also trying different profile photos. I had one with dimensions of 400x400 pixels and another one with dimensions of 256x256 pixels. I didn't fully verify it, but Google apparently didn't like my 400x400 photo. Google wants a clear profile photo of your face. Perhaps some algorithm found my larger photo too grainy or something along those lines. Changing my photo back to the 256x256 version caused my photo to reappear in the search results! I'd suggest trying different dimensions, different photo formats, perhaps even changing the color profile. The search results were updated fairly quickly after I uploaded a working photo. Seems like I saw results in under an hour, YMMV.
You can refer to the photo I used, along with my Contributor to links, at my Google+ page at https://plus.google.com/108810746834291116055. The page that I have my authorship set at is http://blog.ikiapps.com using rel=author.
Update on 2014-Apr-27:
I can confirm my advice worked for me again after completely changing my Google profile to another account and losing the visibility of my authorship associated photo in search results for a brief period of time. It is now restored after following what I posted here.

Google+ badge on websites

I am trying to put a Google+ badge on my recently created websites at sites.google.com. When I copy the code and paste it into the HTML box actually nothing happens.
What am I doing wrong?
You can use to insert a Google+ Badge into your Google Sites pages using a custom gadget:
Get your Google+ profile ID, which you can get from the URL of your profile. The ID would be 123456789012345678901 for this URL: https://plus.google.com/123456789012345678901/ or would be +LarryPage for this URL: https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage/
Edit the page that you want to add the badge
Choose Insert-> ...More gadgets...
Search for G+ Badge.
Paste your profile ID into the G+ ID field.
Configure additional options as necessary for your page. You might need to adjust dimensions of the gadget container to get the badge to work well in your site.
Gadgets have limitations, this might not work perfectly but its probably the best way to get a badge onto your page.
There is a configuration tool for the Google+ Badge that you can find at https://developers.google.com/+/web/badge/.
The key points are that you need to add the HTML as a widget and include the JavaScript tag--which is the same JavaScript that loads any of our Google+ attributes.
I also made a 3 minute video explaining these steps last year, which you can view at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLG4IIIPgnc.

Does Google support Article Rich Snippets?

I have been looking at rich snippets in google. Google lists the following schema.org items as being supported:
Reviews
People
List item
Products
Businesses and organizations
Recipes
Events Music
I have noticed that in search results, Google displays Rich Snippets for Article and BlogPosting. When clicking on the link and using Firebug to check the source code, I can see that the schema.org being used is indeed BlogPosting.
I've tried adding BlogPosting to my sample code and using Google's Rich Snippet tool to check the results but I cant get an image to display. I am using the following code:
<html>
<body> etc etc....
<div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting">
<img itemprop="image" href="/images/test.jpg" item>
</div>
...
Although it doesn't show the image in the Rich Snippet tool, it does recognize that an image has been set and displays the url text in the "Extracted rich snippet data from the page" box. I have tried using the SoftwareApplication schema and then I get an image to show.
My question is: Does the Rich Snippet tool restrict the images it shows based on the schemas listed above, and actually once in the live search results, Rich Snippets for Article and BlogPostings will be shown?
Google has introduced Rich Snippet for Articles, so you can now use articles snippet for your article/blog post.
See this official document from Google on implementing rich snippet for your articles: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/articles
And as far as your image issue is concerned, try to apply the snippet code as per the document above and it should show the image. I tested it and all worked fine.
As of now, Google is not going to display product images in SERPS for schema.org/Article or schema.org/BlogPosting item types. It's going to show the Author profile image that it pulls from Google+ using one of two methods:
https://plus.google.com/authorship
... think about it. Everyone would be trying to attach add some (spammy) image next to their blog post in SERPS. Google only wants to show verified authorship by their authentification methods (via G+) -- not just from any "author" tag in microdata.
Yes, the rich snippet tool will not show you what the actual SERP will always look like, because it depends on the query. In fact they say
Note that there is no guarantee that a Rich Snippet will be shown for
this page on actual search results.