Who should be the author?

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

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  Loren Baker: Interesting, perhaps a CoAuthor schema setup? Listing credentials, title, education, sameAs ... etc. I’m just totally making this up as I’m on my mobile, but would be worth trying. We include all of that in post level SEJ markup for one author.
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  Michael Stricker: The author gets writer credit. Cite and quote the commentators and make a list of contributors with links if you like. Plenty of models in style guides.
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  Loren Baker: Michael Stricker yeah, I would go Little Brown Handbook on this with a list of contributor citations and their credentials at the end of the piece or footnoted, Wiki style. Along with the Contributor markup.
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  Mathias Pantalonias: Everyone involved in contributing to the posts works for the company. One of them, the CEO, already has authorship on a few dozen articles. Everyone who contributes to the posts are insurance brokers with credentials, which the actual writer doesn`t. You can see where I`m going with this.. Sometimes a contributor comes up with the idea of the post and or/writes half of it. In those case, the writer is more of an editor. Maybe in some cases listing co-authors and the writer as the editor? Or does the author have to be the actual writer. That`s what confuses me about authorship. How many technical experts or respected authorities actually do the final write-up vs using an editor?
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  Mathias Pantalonias: Often, the pieces are written as advice, with no actual cited info, just, well, info. Opposed to a news site, a style we`ve gone with in the past, full of "according to John Doe" throughout the pieces. Imagine a listicle of expert insurance advice, all the expert info supplied by the team`s brokers. Seems the credentials of the experts who weighed in are what matters most.
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  Michael Stricker: In those cases, the Author can become an Editor, and the originators can become Authors or Co-Authors. That will enable a reasonable author Profile to be created. With sufficient knowledge, some contributors are expert enough to make a HARO profile, to answer questions in Quora, write Posts on LinkedIn and undertake other trust-building exercises to build evidence of expertise and demonstrate “thought leadership”.
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  Mathias Pantalonias: Ya, Quora is good, and have been wanting the head broker to do a Reddit AMA for a while too.
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  Mathias Pantalonias: Michael in those cases, where would the editor be specified? In the byline along with author/co-authors?
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  Michael Stricker: Mathias Pantalonias could be, or listed among credits on profiles, sidebars or footers.
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  Loren Baker: Contributor Schema: https://schema.org/contributor
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  Loren Baker: A secondary contributor to the CreativeWork
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  Loren Baker: Vahan, let’s put this concept into use on any roundups we may have on SEJ that would be pertinent 👊 Happy to leave process and feedback in this thread... especially for Patty Mantaloons!