Friday, May 3, 2013

Claiming Google ownership on articles with multiple authors

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.


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