Google Authorship issues with a 200+ person company

[B2B.CFO]

So, I wanted to say thank you ahead of time for any help the amazing Moz community may be able to provide me with. I am going to start with giving a little background to the company I work for and then I will ask the question.

We are a 200 person CFO Services firm (www.b2bcfo.com). We have partners almost all over the country and our research with potential partners and clients has shown that they like having a national presence, but they also need a regional/local presence too. To that end, we set up Google Places accounts for each of our partners as they are technically separate businesses under our umbrella.

We also have the main national site (www.b2bcfo.com) and we have regional websites (e.g. www.houstonb2bcfo.com).

We want to set up Google Authorship on each of our partners sections of the regional website, in the process of setting this up, we realized that the Google Plus pages we were using were Local + pages and it didn't seem to give us the option to add the "Contributor on" links to get Google Authorship working.

It seems to me as if the only way we can get Google Authorship working is to set up additional Google Plus accounts (users) and then manage 2 accounts for each professional.

I was wondering if anyone in the community knows a way of getting the Google plus local pages to work  with authorship? Or do you have any other suggestions on how this may work?

Please let me know if you need more information,

Thank you.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Danny, thanks for your question! Google pulls the author information you see in search results from individual Google+ profiles (not brand or local business pages). So yes, each one of your partners will need to establish Authorship by setting up and actively maintaining an individual Google+ profile. (See https://plus.google.com/authorship for details.) Does that answer your question?

I am also going to have a Local search specialist look at this question as well, and see if they can offer any tips for making it easier to manage the individual and Local pages in tandem. Best of luck!

Christy

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Danny,

Seconding what Christy has explained, and also, think you might want to read this post by Mike Blumenthal:

http://localu.org/blog/merge-google-pages-usually-cant-now/

I believe you may find some ideas in there that will help you with what is going to be a major strategical planning session. Wishing you the best of luck!

[B2B.CFO]

Thanks ladies.

It looks as if you have answered the question and confirmed what I thought.

[Christy-Correll]

We are happy to help. Best of luck, Andrew!