Authorship in search results was not as useful as Google expected.
Google has announced in a bog post that it is eliminating Google Authorship. However search results will still include Google+ posts from friends and relevant Google+ pages.
Google first launched its plan for authorship markup in June 2011. Now the internet giant says that articles will no longer include a link to the Google+ profile of their author. Google says that the information is not as useful to its users as it had expected and in some cases even distracts from the overall search results.
Google's official Authorship in web-search support page merely states “Authorship markup is no longer supported in web search.” Nevertheless, the internet giant says it will continue showing Google+ posts from friends and pages on the right-hand side and the main search results.
Earlier in June, Google removed authors’ Google+ profile pictures from search results stating that the tests showed the change improved click-through rates. Now the internet giant says that authorship is neither beneficial nor harmful:
"We've gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we've tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information," Mueller wrote. "Unfortunately, we've also observed that this information isn't as useful to our users as we'd hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we've made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results."
"If you’re curious — in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience."
The reason why the Google results may not have been that useful is that not everyone set up Authorship on their blog or news site. According to Search Engine Land 70% of authors publishing on major web sites made no attempt to connect their authorship with the content they were writing.
Source: Google
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Silky Malhotra
Silky Malhotra loves learning about new technology, gadgets, and more. When she isn’t writing, she is usually found reading, watching Netflix, gardening, travelling, or trying out new cuisines. View Full Profile
