Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you Thomas.  Would there be a benefit in hiring writers with topical expertise or credentials directly, and asking to link their Google+ profiles in the author byline on articles they produce for my sites?  In other words, would Google look more favorably on my site if it had content written by highly-referenced influencers In a particular field?

Thanks!

I've been pretty impressed with the service, and so far it's been worth the price in terms of ROI.  I only publish high-quality content on my sites because obviously I also want to give visitors a reason to subscribe and link in, in addition to getting love from google.

With regards to paying freelance writers, look at it this way: NY Times pays a lot of writers across their sites to produce content--writers who are no more invested in NYTimes than the salary or payment they receive for their work.  I could never put out enough content on my own to stay competitive.  It's simply a division of labor.

I agree with your point about the risk in losing a clear and consistent author voice when using multiple writers.  For that reason alone I might avoid it, coupled with Thomas' point about volume of content being low-value when it comes to author rank.

Hi Jesse, thanks.

To clarify, CrowdContent is not an article submission site.  It's a platform like Contently where you're essentially just hiring freelance writers.  Their writers are all professionals from the US or Canada, and I generally pay between $50-$100 per 500-750 word article.  Quality of content isn't the issue.  It's simply not feasible for me to write all my content across dozens of sites in-house; that wouldn't scale, and I don't see a problem hiring freelancers for that.  Google isn't going to know or care whether I wrote the content or paid someone to.

My question is whether I am missing out on any favorability with visitors or the SEs by not adding an author line to these articles.

I've been using Crowdcontent for article production, and always feel like I'm potentially missing out on some authority or social proof with visitors (and maybe Google?) by not attributing an author (Crowdcontent doesn't give you the name of the author, otherwise I would just use their name).  Would I be doing myself any favors by attributing myself as the author and pointing it back to my Google+ profile?  Thanks in advance for any guidance!