Google Put an End to Google Authorship for Search Result!

Recently updated: January 5th, 2019

Google Authorship ends after three years!

Google Authorship comes to an end after three years. With the recent update by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, Google will no longer show the authorship results in Google search, and will no longer be tracking the data from content by the means of “rel=author” markup.

Turning the history pages of Google Authorship
The project of Google Authorship was rooted in the year of 2011. An expert from Google’s Agent Rank patent described a system for connecting various pieces of content with a digital signature representing one or more agents (authors). Such recognition of the content could be then used to score the author based on various trust and authority signals spotting at the author’s content and that score could be used to influence search ranking.

In June 2011, Google announced that it would be initiating to support authorship markup and the company started encouraging webmasters to begin marking up content on their sites with the “rel=author” and “rel=me” tags, that should be connecting each piece of content to an author profile. By the end of June 2011, Eureka happened and everything started falling into places. The final puzzle piece for Authorship was truly useful to Google that fell into place with the unveiling of Google+ at the end of June 2011. Now, Google+ profiles could serve as Google’s universal identity platform for connecting authors with their content. After then, over the next three years, Authorship in search went through many drastic changes.

Authorship’s slither towards extinction

Over the past eight months, the Authorship program comes to an end after two major reductions of Authorship rich snippets. In December 2013, Google reduced the amount of the author photo snippets that are shown per query. In the starting month of December, only few authorship results were accompanied by an author photo, while others had to settle with a byline. Then, by the end of June 2014, Google removed all author photos from the Google search and leaving just bylines for any qualified authorship results.

At that time, John Mueller revealed the reason behind removing the photos was Google was unifying the user experience between desktop and mobile search. As far as author photos were concerned, they did not work well with the limited screen space and bandwidth of mobile. He also stated that Google did not see any significant difference in “click behavior” between search pages with or without author photos.

Reason behind the cessation of Google Authorship program

Google’s unswerving commitment to testing is one of the prime reasons behind the shuffling of the products. It is true that every product and every change within each product is constantly tested and evaluated. If anything which is not meeting up with the Google’s goals, it surely will get the axe. The two specific areas in which the Authorship experiment was not meeting with the expectations. Read below:

• Stumpy adoption rates by webmasters and authors: – At the time when sites attempted to participate, they frequently did it inaccurately. Besides, most non-tech savvy sites owners or authors felt the markup and linking were too intricate and were appearing as they were trying implemented it. Due to these problems, in the initial months of 2012, Google started attempting to auto-attribute authorship in those cases where there was no or improper markup, or no link from an author profile.
• Low value to the web searchers:- Google was seeing some difference in “click behavior” on global search pages with Authorship snippets. It was totally shocking news to those who has always believed that author snippets brought higher click-through rates. Lately, Google’s data showed that users were not getting sufficient value from authorship snippets.

Wrapping up

Google Authorship was a splendid and magnificent experiment to the users, but everything has to end and so it was. It is better to look forward to something even better for authorship in the future.