G+ profile Authorship

[amitjain]

We have list of many Authors with their G+ profiles contributing stories for the website. And marked as rel=author for stories generated by them. Though we have few stories where we take multiple author's inputs and mark it into Team profile as an Author.

My basic concern over this is, if i mark my story with authorship as team profile i.e. my website's G+ profile as an Author, would that be considered similar to a person's profile author.

Example :

https://plus.google.com/+cardekho - Our G+ profile marked as Author "CarDekho Team" in our stories.

Queries :

1. Does this company page get considered as author?

2. Would this company profile marked as rel=author help in any ranking benefit as an individual Author profile helps in search results?

[FedeEinhorn]

No, authorship is intended for people, not pages.

I think Google was already working on the possibility to add multiple authors to a single post, which can solve your problem by mentioning each author that contributed to that specific article, but I can't find the article I read about 3 - 5 month ago.

[DarinPirkey]

Currently Google Authorship only supports one author per post as far as SERPs go (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/08/relauthor-frequently-asked-advanced.html) but I would recommend adding bylines for all authors on a post so if/when Google allows for multiple authors you have everyone show up there.

1. Does this company page get considered as author?

Technically no. Authorship is meant for individual people whereas Publisher is meant for Brands. However, Publisher may show up withyour Google+ logo if a person who follows you is signed into their Google Plus Profile.  You should have set up rel=publisher to identify cardekho as the publisher of the site and whomever is the author should have a byline.  If there are multiple authors then each author should have a byline.  Google will only support one image in the SERPs however and it will generally be an author.

2. Would this company profile marked as rel=author help in any ranking benefit as an individual Author profile helps in search results?

Again this should be a rel=publisher schema markup issue.  Having authorship show up in search results does tend to lead to higher click through rates but for pure ranking factor as related to Authorship, I think the jury is still out.  I still think domain level metrics are more important then author stats.