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Late August webmaster trends analyst John Mueller announced on Google+ that Google will no longer be showing authorship in search results. He states: “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.”He also mentioned that Google’s tests showed that by removing authorship that it did not reduce organic site traffic or increase ad clicks. (Thought to self: If it did increase ad traffic do you think Google would have made the change anyways?)
Google+ posts from friends and pages will still show up in search results when relevant, but authorship is officially dead. I don’t know about you, but I will personally miss having a more colorful search results page that authorship provided. In my own search habits I wouldn’t say they persuaded me in any positive manner to click on a result, but aesthetically it was a more pleasing search experience. Let me know if you’ll miss it too in the comments below.
To read John’s full post on the matter you can read more here – https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8
Written by: Mike Knorr – Director of Sales and Marketing
