Google started off asking everyone to add authorship to their web pages. It was a way to help progress the search results and help legitimize them. Google would rewards those who would add authorship to their pages. Yet, it didn't seem to do the trick as Google had wanted it to. Over the years, they had contemplated leaving the entire idea behind and moving towards something that was better, but they continued along. This was until after two years, when they realized it was best to shut down the entire idea and stop forcing people to do something that wasn't working out.
Google will now not be looking at finding authors who have written on pages and connecting back to their profiles. They have decided this is not as helpful as it was supposed to be and most users are not interested in this information anyway. They key is quality content and that is going to remain for the foreseeable future when it comes to Google's algorithm. The content that has authorship will not be tracked for this specific characteristic any more like it used to over the past few years.
Sadly, the feature didn't work out as well as expected, and after playing with authorship for three years, Google finally decided to cull the feature. They have been gradually decreasing the prominence of authorship over the last few months, leading to speculation that the feature was due to be culled. In June they removed Google+ profile photos from the search results, and also stopped showing Google+ follower counts.
John Mueller of Google stated that their data showed no significant difference in the click rates of results with photo an author byline and those without. Briefly, this means users don't care about such details, therefore it doesn't make sense to invest resources in providing them anymore.
It's not clear if the Google authorship is gone forever. It is possible that the concept of semantic search may reveal other ways of identifying authors of various online documents. So far, it is clear that methods that involve actions from humans, namely webmasters, are more or less doomed, since humans are subject to errors and misunderstandings more than we would like to admit. Automation can make this identification much more reliable, so it is possible to see some new approaches in this direction coming from Google engineers and technicians.
However, after three years of experimenting with this feature, Google management has concluded that readers did not find it as valuable as they thought it would be and that it could even pose a distraction.
Google will now not be looking at finding authors who have written on pages and connecting back to their profiles. They have decided this is not as helpful as it was supposed to be and most users are not interested in this information anyway. They key is quality content and that is going to remain for the foreseeable future when it comes to Google's algorithm. The content that has authorship will not be tracked for this specific characteristic any more like it used to over the past few years.
Sadly, the feature didn't work out as well as expected, and after playing with authorship for three years, Google finally decided to cull the feature. They have been gradually decreasing the prominence of authorship over the last few months, leading to speculation that the feature was due to be culled. In June they removed Google+ profile photos from the search results, and also stopped showing Google+ follower counts.
John Mueller of Google stated that their data showed no significant difference in the click rates of results with photo an author byline and those without. Briefly, this means users don't care about such details, therefore it doesn't make sense to invest resources in providing them anymore.
It's not clear if the Google authorship is gone forever. It is possible that the concept of semantic search may reveal other ways of identifying authors of various online documents. So far, it is clear that methods that involve actions from humans, namely webmasters, are more or less doomed, since humans are subject to errors and misunderstandings more than we would like to admit. Automation can make this identification much more reliable, so it is possible to see some new approaches in this direction coming from Google engineers and technicians.
However, after three years of experimenting with this feature, Google management has concluded that readers did not find it as valuable as they thought it would be and that it could even pose a distraction.
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