Optimizing your author page

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Michael Martinez: If you don`t have anything to say about an author then don`t publish an empty author page. If the site has multiple authors (actually publishing posts) then allowing their archives to be indexed CAN help the site`s crawl performance (there are no guarantees and this can go bad in a lot of ways). It really comes down to what kind of user experience you want to create when someone sees the author`s name and tries to read more or learn more about that author. If you hide the author names then you don`t need the archives. Also, if you`re publishing content from the admin account, it`s probably better to hide the author (or at least that account) to make it a little bit more challenging for scoutbots to figure out what account names may be vulnerable to brute force dictionary attacks.
• 
  Zawar Kamal: All the author pages redirects to homepage. Is that ok?
• 
  Michael Martinez: Zawar Kamal It won`t directly hurt anything. We do this on some Websites. The worst you`re doing is denying the search engines additional crawl paths. That places a greater burden on whatever navigation you have in place. If the site doesn`t have much content that probably won`t matter. It does tend to hurt crawl efficiency as you add more content because blog archive index structures are not designed for good crawl. See how often your older content drops out of the index. If you struggle to keep it indexed then consider allowing the search engines to find and crawl the author archives.