Google Authorship: Having others write content and authorship link to/from G+ profiles Impact Ranking?

[BBuck]

Hi all! I am considering having several others write content for a new website and authorship link each to/from G+ profiles. Any idea of how that will Impact page/website ranking? I would think it would give more credibility to each page, and the website as a whole. No?

[SamuelScott]

Based on Google's own statements and SEOs' research, here's what we can say:

1. A page will not rank more highly just because it incorporates Google+ authorship.

2. However, a search result may have a higher click-through rate because of the photo and associated Google+ authorship within the result. (Results with markup tend to have higher CTRs than those with only text.)

3. Google+ authorship can improve branding (and thereby CTR) -- but only if the individual author is a brand himself or herself. An SEO article with, say, Rand Fishkin's authorship helps a lot more than authorship from some "Bob Smith" that no ones knows and who has a very small Google+ following.

4. The more that a site is active on Google+ in general, the more that the site will tend to appear in personalized search results of people who have followed or "+1"ed that site on Google+.

Now, here's where it gets tricky. A top Google executive said at SMX West (I was there) that Google is looking into what doing could be termed an "AuthorRank" in the future. The theory: If Google deems an author to be a credible authority on a given topic, then that person's content will be more likely to rank for searches on that topic. However, this is all hypothetical at this point. It may or may not happen.

The brief exchange:

DS: On authorship, there is no author rank, but could that become a signal?

AS: Possibly it could.

I hope this helps! My recommendation: Build the brands of both your company and individual staffers/contributors on Google+. I personally think this will be the best action for the long term.

[EGOL]

I agree with Samuel.

I also saw a video in which Matt Cutts was saying that they were removing authorship benefits (photo in the SERPs, showing to people in your circles},  for lots of low-quality authors.

So, just slapping authorship onto a page isn't going to be a magic bullet.