Last week tech giant Google stopped displaying authorship in its search results, this meant that the articles that you search on Google will no longer have a link to the Google+ profile of their authors. According to the company, it had to take this step because the company found out the information was not being as helpful to the users as Google hoped it to be, and in some cases, it even distracted the user from the overall search results.
The official Authorship in web search support now reads "Authorship markup is no longer supported in web search". It then directs people interested in adding markup to their websites to structured data and rich snippets.
In June this year, the tech giant had even removed the author's Google+ profile features from the search results. At that time, John Mueller, Google’s Webmasters Trend analyst justified the company’s decision by saying that the test conducted by the tech giant have shown that the this move improved the click through rates, this step was a direct contradiction to the Company’s original thinking.
"If you're curious-in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce the traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our user's experience", said Muller on the latest step taken by Google.
The tech giant will still show the Google+ posts from friends and pages on the right hand side and in the main search results. Those who wanted or wished that the tech giant would completely get rid of Google+ from its main product are in for some bad news.
The authorship markup was first unveiled by Google in June, 2011. Since then, it has undergone a lot of changes and updates. With authorship being dropped completely by Google, Webmasters can now have a sigh of relief and remove all the rel=author markup that they have on their site. All the efforts that had to be put in adding and maintaining the site are no longer needed and this is basically what happens when a lot of Web properties depend on a single source for attracting massive traffic.
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