Will authorship help or hurt us?

[OxzenMedia]

Our Client has a pest control site with tons of articles. We suggested they link their articles to their author.

They said they want an allies they can keep separate.

We said ok... From what I understand google uses author score to help determine rankings.

If a author that all of a sudden has 400 pages of content attributed to him and he is new to google plus will this hurt his rankings?

This is an area where I need to spend some time learning.

thanks.

[RobertFisher]

Given the role of authorship, I don't believe it will and we have authors who create 150 to 200 pages per month. One of those is a new copywriter with no previous G+ page(within last 6 weeks) and we are not suffering at all from her linking to her new G+. Trust me, I watch this site like I watch my son play basketball.

Since this is a client, I would urge you first to do a bit of investigative work to insure the content is theirs.

Do the homework so that you are not claiming a bunch of articles as theirs when they were taken from somewhere else by someone else.

If their are more than one author on the content, use rel=pub for the site and then individual authors for the pages/posts.

Hope it helps

[Gyi]

Is Authorship used by Google as a ranking signal? (i.e., does it factor into search rankings?)

Not for now, but it isn’t off the table.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-authorship-an-interview-with-googles-sagar-kamdar-part-1

I'd worry less about the short-term impact of authorship on rankings, and more about how you can use authorship to provide better access to your great content to your audience.

That's not an argument against implementing authorship, but it's a re-framing of the reasons why you may or may not pursue your above-suggested course of action.