Changing the author of a post

[Leighm]

Hi,

I've a number of wordpress posts that were written by different authors, and I want to merge them into a single author. If Google sees that originally the post was rel authored to person A and later we change the author reference to person B, will Google see this as suspicious in any way?

Or does it not matter, as long as it's only attributed to a single author at any one time?

Thanks,

Leigh

[William.Lau]

Won't matter from what I know. Unless the links are going to the author's list of posts(don't forget to redirect to the merged author), it won't really matter.

Changing the author won't give any real affect unless the author is really that authoritative in your niche(very unlikely).

[Leighm]

Thanks Willny. Can you clarify what you mean by "Unless the links are going to the author's list of posts"?

[William.Lau]

Meaning the link to the Author's page where ALL of his articles are available for view. I don't remember what the wordpress link was but basically something like www.wordpress.com/authors_name/

Where it shows all the author's posts, just redirect www.wordpress.com/authors_name/ to www.wordpress.com/new_authors_name/

[Leighm]

We don't actually link the author's name to an author page, so I think we're ok there. Thanks for the clarification.

[evolvingSEO]

Leigh

Just making sure you're all set. As far as I know, this will not raise a flag in terms of authorship.

What Williams is talking about is the "author archive" and if you're using an SEO plugin (I recommend Yoast) you'll want to noindex author archives and I even disable them for a single author blog. They end up looking like a duplicate of the main blog page if its a single author blog.

-Dan

[Leighm]

Thanks Dan. I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO. It's a great plugin. I have the author archive disabled.