Google No Longer Uses Authorship Markup

[engine]

According to news coming out of SMX, and Gary Illyes, Google no longer needs Authorship Markup to understand about the author.

[seroundtable.com...]

It's not made clear how Google understands the author details, but the markup need no longer be included.

Here's a bit of the history of authorship markup.

Google Starts Supporting Authorship Markup [webmasterworld.com] Jun 7, 2011
Google Authorship deemphasizing markup [webmasterworld.com] Oct 28, 2013
Continuing Demise of Authorship Stats [webmasterworld.com]Jul 20, 2014
Google Authorship Support Dropped [webmasterworld.com] Aug 29, 2014

[ergophobe]

I thought they had already announced this quite a while back?

[engine]

What they dropped was the display of authorship, but they still used it to identify authors. They now no longer need the markup at all. In other words, the markup can be removed entirely.

[aristotle]

What about all the thousands of spammers that tried to use it. Can Google identify them too?

[ergophobe]

>>What they dropped was the display

I remember that from way back. But I thought I also remembered an almost identical quote saying they dropped it because they didn't need it because they had gotten good a parsing bylines and such.

[ergophobe]

I think I was remembering this 2014 article from Danny Sullivan and confusing in my head that it had been Illyes or Mueller because it sounds so much like the Illyes quote

The answer is that Google has other ways to determine who it believes to be the author of a story, if it wants. In particular, Google is likely to look for visible bylines that often appear on news stories. These existed before Google Authorship, and they aren’t going away.
-- src: [searchengineland.com...]