Google: It Is Now Safe To Remove Authorship Markup, We Don't Use It Anymore

So after almost two years since Google officially killed authorship, Gary Illyes from Google said it is finally safe to remove authorship markup from your pages.

Just a few months ago, Gary said don't remove authorship from your pages, that Google may still use it. We know they used it for in-depth articles still, but not any more.

Gary Illyes said Google now doesn't use them at all. He said they have other ways to know who wrote which articles and no longer depend on authorship to determine it. So it is safe to remove authorship from your pages.

I do miss authorship, but who am I?

Here are some tweets from the SMX Advanced AMA with Google with Gary Illyes, which you can also watch on Facebook:

Google @methode says we do not use authorship anymore, not even indepth articles. But we know who the author is... #smx — Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) June 23, 2016

from @methode “we are not using authorship at all anymore…we are smarter than that.” but thanks for giving them all that data, SEOs. #smx — MichelleRobbins (@MichelleRobbins) June 23, 2016

Authorship not used at all as a ranking signal, however, that doesn’t mean they don’t know who the author is #SEO #SMX — Margarita G. Shapiro (@mgrisales) June 23, 2016

.@methode on authorship: We're smarter than that now. We don't need it. #smx — Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 23, 2016

Forum discussion at Twitter.