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Hey Anthony, I would suggest that this is just as applicable to Author or Organisation and really, I would not even be looking to index these secure pages & I would only use Author on a specific piece of content and organisation on a contact page or some such page about the business. I have to say I am no expert on Schema but it was my understanding that the idea is to mark up individual pages to provide additional relevance. That is, your whole site does not contain microdata about the organisation and as such you would not want to display such a snippet of information. Likewise, your shopping cart is not published by a specific author. Disclaimer, I am no expert here but will be interesting to see what other's have to say. Marcus

I've run into the same problem. As best as I can tell, it can't be done. To link your personal Google+ profile to your content, you have to use the "Contributor to" section under the "About" page of your profile. Google+ Pages have no such section. The only work-around I can think of is the "company persona" option you mention, but like you said, that defeats the point of authorship.

This. As for whether Google would penalize you simply for using a particular hosting provider, almost definitely not. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Google keeps an eye on sites  that have way too many links from a single DNS server.

I'm willing to bet its an issue with their crawler as Robert mentions above. While you wait on confirmation for this, make sure that your web server is not configured to serve to any unnecessary ports. For the vast majority of sites, you only need to listen to the default port 80. This apache doc may help you with this.

Yes, your link back to the other site is in good faith and good for readers.  If you don't do it too much, you shouldn't get dinged for recip linking. About 4 or 5 years ago I used to see sites do this, usually using the robots.txt file to exclude spidering ot their links page.  i don't know if it;'s the "best practice" but it seems robots,txt was used more often than noindex on the page. It's a sleazy thing to do and yes, it can cause bad blood with your link partners.  I know because on more than one occasion I informed sites about that practice being used on them, and they removed their outbound links and thanked me for pointing out how they were being played for chumps.

The post seems to have been updated with a retraction of sorts, saying that it's rare but can happen, which is my stance (indeed I mentioned it in a question a couple of days ago). I actually think it's more rare now than it used to be, but there was a time when you could do a lot of harm to someone by pointing these bad links at them. Alas I'm not going to be able to back that up with any solid examples, because I was too much of a n00b and on the fringes of SEO when I first learned about it 4 or 5 years ago and it's not something I've been a participant in myself since. EDIT: What I will say though is we're not talking about getting low quality sites pointing links in to you, that's almost never likely to harm you. Pharmacy links, malware, spyware, paid networks and such like which can be traced back to an offending site are more along the lines you want to think about. Spending time setting that kind of thing up and putting just the right amount of effort into making it difficult, but not impossible, to trace to a competitor was the sort of thing people were being paid a decent amont of money to do.

Cool!  I'm primarily concerned with for-profit uses, so that's great to know.  I'll definitely check it out.  Thanks for sharing your experience.

If I was producing content that is a "big hit"... I would  be posting it on my own site (and nowhere else) and building links into it there.

I'm not sure on the exact scheduling, but the rankings are only updated periodically. You should see your rank updated by tomorrow at the latest.