How does Marfeel detect the author and byline of an article?

Marfeel detects both the real author and the public byline of every article, exposing them as dimensions on Explore, Optimize, and Compass views. The detection relies on a waterfall of heuristics applied during editorial crawling, starting with structured data and falling back through meta tags.

An Author refers to the person responsible for creating a piece of content like an article, a blog post, or any other form of written material. This normally matches the author declared in the CMS.

A Byline is the public text that acknowledges and identifies the author(s) responsible for creating an article. This normally matches the public byline as informed in the structured data.

An Author may have multiple bylines for different reasons:

1. Pseudonyms or pen names: Some authors write under a pseudonym or pen name, either for personal reasons or to maintain separation between different areas of their work. In such cases, they could have multiple bylines associated with their different pen names.
2. Variations in name representation: An author’s name may be represented differently across various publications or platforms.

As an example, the Author John Smith might publish articles using these different bylines:

1. John Smith
2. JS
3. J.S.
4. John S.
5. J. Smith
6. Generic Editorial byline

Marfeel exposes both the real Author of an article along with the used Byline as dimensions on Explore, Optimize and Compass views.

How does Marfeel detect Bylines?

Important:This information is gathered by marfeel crawler. Marfeel crawler does not execute javascript. The information must be in the HTML response and not loaded by JS.

Marfeel auto-tracks article bylines using the following heuristics waterfall:

1. JSON+LD (For more details visit https://schema.org/author)

   <script type="application/ld+json">
   {
     "@context": "https://schema.org",
     "@type": "NewsArticle",
     "author": [
       {
         "@type":"Person",
         "name":"Author One"
       },
       {
         "@type":"Person",
         "name":"Author Two"
       }
     ]
   }
   </script>

   <script type="application/ld+json">
   {
     "author": "Author One"
   }
   </script>

2. Meta tag “article:author” (supports both property and name attributes)

   <meta property="article:author" content="Author One">

3. Meta tag name=“author”

   <meta name="author" content="Author One">

4. Property rel=“author”. This only applies on editorials with a publication date.

   <a href="https://domain.com/author-one/" rel="author">Author One</a>

How does Marfeel detect Authors?

To track the Author that created an article, use the mrf:authors meta tag. If mrf:authors is not explicitly set, the field is automatically populated with the Byline value.

<meta property="mrf:authors" content="Author 1" />

You can list as many authors as necessary with semicolons:

<meta property="mrf:authors" content="Author 1;Author 2;Author 3" />

From the Marfeel’s User Profile page, users can associate an Author to a Marfeel user account, which allows the platform to track content contributions and manage permissions accordingly.

You can also use the name attribute as an alternative to the property attribute.

Encrypting Authors

For strategic situations where you don’t want to openly expose author names but still want to track them on Marfeel, you can use encrypted authors. When authors are declared as encrypted, the real values will only be visible by Marfeel.

Learn more about encrypting authors, sections, and tags

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How does Marfeel detect bylines?

Marfeel auto-tracks bylines using a heuristics waterfall: first JSON-LD schema.org author data, then the article:author meta tag, then the meta name="author" tag, and finally rel="author" links on editorials with a publication date. The crawler does not execute JavaScript, so the information must be present in the server-side HTML response.

How does Marfeel detect authors?

Use the mrf:authors meta tag to declare the real author of an article. Multiple authors can be listed with semicolons. If mrf:authors is not set, the field is automatically populated with the byline value.

Can authors be encrypted in Marfeel?

Yes. For strategic situations where you do not want to openly expose author names, Marfeel supports encrypted authors. When declared as encrypted, real values are only visible within Marfeel.