Google ends Authorship functionality [@SmartInsights alert]

Google’s use of “rel=author” markup to stop but Google+ posts to continue featuring in search results

Importance: [rating=4]

Recommended link: Google announcement of end of Authorship

Summary of the change

John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools announced in a personal Google+ post on 28th August that Google will now stop showing authorship results in Google Search, and will no longer be tracking data from content using rel=author markup.

From a Google user point of view this means you will no longer see author images in pictures like this one from a briefing written by Chris Soames in 2012:

In fact, you may have noticed from around a month ago that Google removed the author images. In this new announcement they are taking the next step and removing the author information too.

We’re also alerting you to this since more significantly from an SEO point of view Google has said that they are no longer using the data associated with markup.

The Reasons for the Removal of Authorship?

Google gives these reasons:

1. 1. Low adoption rates by authors and webmasters. While many marketing sites like our have enthusiastically adopted Authorship, this was not the case in other sectors.Searchengineland reports on this test that showed that even amongst major publishers journalists were not integrating their Google+ profiles:

   

2. 2. Low value to searchers. Google has said there is limited difference in click behaviour, i.e. clickthrough rate from results with these rich author snippets. This goes against what we have found and others have reported, but the decision has been made anyway. John Mueller has said:
   

   “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”.

Implications for Marketers?

Well, if you were planning to implement authorship, you can discard that task! If you already have you can disable the feature to slightly reduce page bloat, although most will keep the markup even if it's redundant I imagine.

Is this the end of Google+?

Many have taken this change as a yet another sign of the impending end of Google+. While it certainly removes a key feature integrating Google+ into the search results Jon Mueller reminds us that Google will still feature personalised Google+ link recommendations in the search results page, so this is not a reason to stop activity on Google+:

“It’s also worth mentioning that Search users will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query — both in the main results, and on the right-hand side. Today’s authorship change doesn’t impact these social features”.

Google has also stated that it is committed to other forms of Schema.org markup - so we still encourage these for SEO purposes.