Last week, we reported that it is safe to remove authorship markup from you site, citing Gary Illyes who said Google now completely doesn't use authorship anymore.
So a follow up question on that was asked this morning in a Google Hangout on Google+ where John Mueller said it doesn't mean that Google knows who wrote articles now that authorship is gone, with authorship they knew that but now it seems like he is implying that has not been replaced by something else.
The question was:
At SMX Advanced last month, Gary told us you knew who had written the article without Authorship (program). Does that mean you take it into consideration who wrote the article when evaluating the quality of the content?
John answered it saying:
So it is not so much that we know which person wrote which article but if we find the same article multiple places on the web then we are pretty good at figuring out where this kind of originated from. So with that in mind we do try to bubble up the original content on a site and that is something we would take into account when looking at the how we should show a page in the search results, how these individual pages are relevant for this specific query. Is this a copy of a specific article or is this an original written by this person or by that site.
See that, he said "it is not so much that we know which person wrote which article but if we find the same article multiple places on the web then we are pretty good at figuring out where this kind of originated from." So Google has always had that in place, the ability to tell the originating story - it isn't always perfect at it, but it is pretty good.
But what about knowing who wrote it and where re they writing? Is that out the widow? It may seem so based on what John said...
John did go on to also explain it is safe to remove your authorship or leave it, it doesn't matter - Google doesn't use it. He said:
So also, he mentioned we don’t use authorship markup at all. So you can, those who have been holding off on wether or not to add authorship markup to your site, you really don’t need to do that. At the same time, you don’t need to remove it either. It is not the case that you’d have any problems by removing it. If you are doing a revamp of your site and cleaning things up… then maybe that is something you can drop.
Here is the video embed, it starts at 10 minutes in to the video:
Forum discussion at Google+.
