The gold-assisted exfoliation is a very effective method to produce large-area (cm 2 -scale) membranes of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) for electronics. However, the strong MoS2/Au interaction, beneficial for the exfoliation process, has a strong impact on the vibrational and light emission properties of MoS2.Here, we report an atomic force microscopy (AFM), micro-Raman (-R) and micro-Photoluminescence (-PL) investigation of 2H-MoS2 with variable thickness exfoliated on Au and subsequently transferred on an Al2O3/Si substrate. The E2g -A1g vibrational modes separation (typically used to estimate MoS2 thickness) exhibits an anomalous large value (21.2 cm -1 ) for monolayer (1L) MoS2 on Au as compared to the typical one (18.5 cm -1 ) measured on 1L MoS2 on Al2O3. Such substrate-related differences, explained in terms of tensile strain and p-type doping arising from the MoS2/Au interaction, were found to gradually decrease while increasing the number of MoS2 layers. Furthermore, -PL spectra for 1L MoS2 on Au exhibit a strong quenching and an overall red-shift of the main emission peak at 1.79