Otto has a great post over on make.wordpress explaining how to associate your WordPress plugins with yourself as the author in Google search results. I just tried it, easy, and it worked.
While Google+ may not be the hot social area on the block, it does seem to have some benefits. Studies show that listings with a specified author receive much more clicks and attention than those that do not.
Who doesn’t want more attention to their hand-crafted WordPress plugins? More traffic? More readers? More leads? More collaborators…?
I think it makes the listing much more attractive as well, of course, that all depends on your mug too =)
Plugin authors developers are “contributors” to WordPress and should be benefiting from these Google author listings.
Go set up your WordPress profile with a link to Google+ as well as a link to your WordPress profile on your Google+ profile.
This gives Google the data they need to give you “credit” for your work in their search listings. Not that this by any means guarantees that your listings will include this data, but it does do all the set up so it is possible.
Google also provides a Rich Snippet Tool to preview and test that all your associations are set up properly. So don’t stop at WordPress. To me, this is all related to branding, and in having a consistent showing and presence across the web.