Now, I do not know if authorship was ever a ranking signal but I assume Google tested it to see if it should be. And we now know Google said it is safe to remove authorship markup from your pages and they also said they don't know who authored something on your site.
But Google has said over the years, I remember Matt Cutts calling out certain authors as awesome and can help your site rank for stuff if you get them to write for you. But I guess that was tested and it didn't play into Google's definition of what is quality content.
John Mueller addressed the question again on Friday's Google Hangout on Google+. He said that Google doesn't know who wrote the article on your site and even if you do have a great writer, write something on your site, it might not be something great that he wrote. So each article needs to "stand on their own," John said.
He said this at the 36:41 minute mark.
Question:
Previously, you said you didn't know really who wrote an article. Does it mean it's not a ranking factor who created content? Danny Sullivan is a great author. If he guest-posted on my blog, wouldn't you think the article would be great because it's made by him?
Answer:
Probably we wouldn't know that. I mean maybe the article is great and it would rank essentially on its own or based on kind of the feedback that we see from users with regards to recommendations like links. But just because a well-known author publishes on someone else's blog doesn't automatically make that blog post really relevant. So it might be that Danny Sullivan post something on some totally random blog and we don't realize that and other users don't realize that, then that's something that might my kind of get lost like that.So that's also something we're just because one person person wrote it doesn't necessarily mean that the quality will always be really high. So we shouldn't like assume that just because it has maybe Danny Sullivan's author markup on that page that this article is suddenly really valuable and should be raking very high. So from from that point of view at these pages these articles that are written by people they really have to be able to stand on their own.
So I guess, maybe, Google tested to see if who writes something is a good ranking signal? Or maybe, SEOs faked authorship and killed it and Google couldn't use it?
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at Google+.
