Google is committed to Search. But is equally committed to rigorous Testing of all of its products. And it is not afraid to pull one from its “shelf” if the data it collects does not meet its own requirements and align to its goals well. As of yesterday, John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools announced in a Google+ post that the search engine will cease displaying authorship results in Search Engine Results pages. Google has “dropped all Authorship functionality” from being seen in SERPs.
Here are the reasons stated, according to Search Engine Land:
1. Low adoption rates by authors and webmasters. Few people used authorship because it was so difficult and confusing to implement. The adoption rate therefore suffered.
2. Low value to searchers. Also, according to the Search Engine Land article, “John Mueller stated that Google was seeing little difference in “click behavior” on search result pages with Authorship snippets compared to those without. This came as a shock (accompanied in many cases with outright disbelief) to those who had always believed that author snippets brought higher click-through rates.”
Many people suspect that one of the drivers of killing this system is that about half or more of all of Google’s traffic now comes from mobile devices , where real estate comes at a premium. The sheer amount of space Authorship photos etc. would take up are costly.
Proving authorship quality is still going to be on Google’s radar, and we doubt it will give up on developing a more efficacious, error free way to do so that also has a high adoption rate online.
NOTE: the above is meant only for informational purposes as an article summary of an original article posted on the below website with the below listed authors.
CREDITS: The original article was co-authored by Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen.