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:

Answer:

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+.