I want my website to become eligible for Google+ Direct Connect.
So after googling a bit I found this Google Support page, which has since been edited.
View Google Support page providing these instructions via WayBack Machine:
You can directly link your website by inserting a small snippet of code on your website and then listing that website as your Google+ page's primary link in the About section of the profile. For example, if your Google+ page’s primary link is set to www.pagewebsite.com, you can create a bidrectional link by placing the following code snippet in the
<head>tag of the site’s HTML:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/{+PageId}" rel="publisher" />
What gives? An anchor tag within the head?
I thought only title/meta/link tags are allowed in the head.
Is it legal to place that above snippet in the head tag?
I think there's an error in Google's documentation and this should be a <link>-tag, like this:
<link href="https://plus.google.com/{+PageId}" rel="publisher" />
You can test it on https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ if it works. Include the <link>-tag into your website and see what Google detects with this tool. There's a section "Publisher" where you can see if Google detects the correct information.
I'm using <link> on my sites and Google detects the correct values.