When talking to our editors about the capability to claim ownership on articles and tutorials, the question came up, how to deal with the fact that a portion of our content is authored by multiple authors.
I've posted A question to Google Webmaster forum, but have not received any answer: Can you claim joint ownership for a singe piece of content ?
However in cases where one author is the primary author, and the supporting authors agree one can claim ownership, we do have a solution that passes the Google Snippets Test tool.
When we have multiple G+ profile links on an article, only one will include the "?rel=author parameter. This author gets ownership credit.
Our content is generated through XSLT, so we'll add conditional coding. If there is one author, that G+ profile url will be appended with "?rel=author. If there are multiple authors, we will look for an attribute, such as owning-author=yes (default is no). For multiple authors, if one author is assigned owning-author-yes, we'll append ?rel=author to the end of that G+ profile url. If we encounter multiple owning-author=yes settings in a single file, default will be no one gets ownership.
