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| Google To Kill Authorship Once And For All! |
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.
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.
Google will, however, continue to focus on schema.org structured markup according to John Mueller.
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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