It's official! Google will kill Authorship from search results entirely. Last month, the company took us all by surprise when Webmaster...
It's official! Google will kill Authorship from search results entirely. Last month, the company took us all by surprise when Webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller announced that profile pictures will be stripped away. Seemingly, all that was in a bid to free up some real estate on search result pages, but at least it left author names in search results. Google, however has now decided to strip all Authorship information from search results.
Why did Google remove authorship?
It has been confirmed by Google’s John Mueller that Authorship information will be removed from search results entirely. The decision was made apparently because the information was not found to be overly useful to searchers, and at times has even detracted from the search results.
According to Mueller;
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.
Would it make any difference?
While it's unfortunate to see Authorship being stripped off from search results entirely, this new development should not make any difference to site owners. After profile images were gone, Author names did little to boost CTR and increase traffic, except for some very popular authors and websites. Now that it's gone completely, it shouldn't make much of a difference for a majority of sites out there.
This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.
Google first started implementing Authorship around the time as the launch of Google+. However, removing Authorship information doesn’t mean that Google+ content from people in your circles will be removed from search results. Mueller points out users will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query.
What do you think about the removal of Authorship information? Do you think it should go, or is Google making a bad bet? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
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