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articles now that authorship is gone, with authorship they knew that but now it seems like he is implying that has not been replaced by something else.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:

John answered it saying:

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:

Here is the video embed, it starts at 10 minutes in to the video:

Forum discussion at Google+.