Do multiple authors writing blog content directly improve serps?

[JS_Harris]

A question: While doing some research using Google blog search I found an old article of mine that had "admin" listed as author. The article is from when I launched that particular site a long time ago. I performed a site search for my site and found all of my articles show an author name.

About a month into the sites existance I removed the meta data links from the template. Articles written during that period list "webmaster" as author. A month after that I finished the template and re-installed the author meta data underneath each article title, along with the posting date. I also added my name as author to be shown for my articles and sure enough every article since then credits me as author.

I was wondering, since Google is evaluating the content to determine who is the author it stands to reason that Google is also counting the number of authors when it finds such data. Does anyone here have experience with both single and multi-author sites and can you speculate on wether or not you think the site with multiple users receives any benefit on the search results side?

[tedster]

I've never seen a hint of anything like that, and I can't coneptualize what the logic behind such a ranking factor would be. The number of authors doesn't seem, to me, to be a useful signal - especially with all the other truly solid signals that Google is already using. It would also be a trivial thing to fake.

I could see it as a secondary influence - a wider variety of writers might attract more backlinks, or the blog might be updated more frequently, but I can't see any direct influence on ranking. In fact, I know of several blogs that changed to a number of authors from a single author, and though I haven't studied the stats in depth, all I've noticed is the secondary effects that I mentioned above.

[JS_Harris]

I've never seen a hint of anything like that, and I can't conceptualize what the logic behind such a ranking factor would be

Google is placing a premium on sites with multiple authors for their Google News program, you can't be accepted without them anymore. Multi-author sites likely have a higher chance of being spam free I suppose.

Google news requirements + blog search tracking this data is at least two signs that it may indeed be a factor somehow. I should add too that the author name on my site isn't wrapped in a tag with any class that says "author" or "meta", it's a regular link that says "by" in front of it... which enough for Google to know it's an author link, along with proximity to article title I suppose.

[tedster]

For Google News, that makes sense. But for regular search, or even blog search, I still don't quite see it as a potential algo factor.

There is a good chance that acceptance in the Google News program also gives a site a boost in regular search. Then we'd have another possible secondary effect. But this is conjecture on my part. If you have the means to test around this idea, that would be interesting. Some approaches you might take:

1. Adding more authors to a legacy domain that is grandfathered into Google News with one author

2. Getting another domain into Google News and seeing how that acceptance affects the site's regular Google traffic. Lots of variables to watch for around that possibility, however, including Universal Search importaing the news search into the regular serps.

Testing around a program such as Google News would take a lot more effort and resources than testing around the regular algo - but if the possibility is there, it would be interesting to see.

[JS_Harris]

The name Google chooses to attribute articles on blog search is by no means accurate. With wordpress a simple switch of accounts (or addition of a dozen nicknames and using those as a name) would provide an easy way to test this.

Unfortunately I'm not willing to risk this site for testing purposes and I don't have time for even more tests. I'll make a note of it though and perhaps down the road test it further if nobody else does.