Google ditches authorship tool and admits “it isn’t as useful as we hoped”
Google has ditched its authorship tool, admitting in a Google+ post that it “isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped”.
Google authorship allowed journalists and bloggers to link their articles to their Google+ profiles, creating a ‘rich snippet’. This saw the name of the author and their image appearing to the left of the article, making it stand out more from the rest of the articles on the Google search page.
John Mueller, webmaster trends analyst at Google, said: “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. 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.”
He added that search users will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query.
Mueller stated that going forward, Google will be “continuing and expanding our support of structured markup (such as schema.org). 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.”
He insists that removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites, and does not increase ad clicks.