Last month we reported that Google would be removing Authorship pictures from search results. Now it has been confirmed by Google’s John Mueller that Authorship information will be removed from search results entirely.
The decision was made to drop Authorship information because the information was not found to be overly useful to searchers, and at times has even detracted from the search results.
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.
While it’s unfortunate to see Authorship information going away, it really should not make a difference to site owners. Since Authorship didn’t help to increase traffic to pages, then site owners shouldn’t notice a decrease in traffic going forward.
Something Mueller notes that Google will continue to focus on is Schema.org structured markup: “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? Will you be sad to see it go, or do you think its time has come?
