Here's a tip for everyone who wants to play a social signal game, hands off:
1. After you make a website, simply create a Google+ profile with a fake persona. Fill out every detail about your fake persona in there. For example, if my site is about washing machines, I would make a profile "John Doe" and fill out my description and every box possible with relevant info. Something like this:
"Hey guys, my name is John Doe, I live in New York, and I own a washing machine repair shop near Queens. I have a wife and two beautiful kids. In my free time, I also maintain my website, where I talk about various models of machines....BLABLA"....you get, fill all the boxes out, even your high school, college, etc. You want to make the profile look real.
2. Connect the Google+ profile to your website via rel=author. You can read how to connect the G+ profile to your site here: .
3. Fire up Web2Rule. I won't post a tutorial here, because the authors have explained everything nicely in the video tutorials. The most powerful aspect of the tool is that you will start getting Google+ followers, which will boost your author credibility. You'll also get +1s, Tweets and Likes passively every day. I set mine to 3 of each per day. You can set Tweets and likes to more (5 per day), but I'd go with max 3 +1s per day.
I did this to one of my test affiliate sites and I got it ranked #1 with no backlinks. It's #1 for 3 terms which don't have that much searches, but are cold-killer buyer keywords. Now I make around $500/per month with a 3 page site that gets maybe 90-100 visitors per day. No plugins, nothing. Longtails and main keywords - #1 for everything.
I don't know if Google is taking Google+ authorship seriously yet, but my results prove that something is definitely going on in the social signal department. Combine this with the smart use of a tool such as GSA SER, and you got yourself covered. Everything on autopilot, minus maintenance.
Hope this has helped some of you