Google started off asking everyone to add authorship to their web pages. It was a way to help progress the search results and help legitimize them. Google would rewards those who would add authorship to their pages. Yet, it didn't seem to do the trick as Google had wanted it to. Over the years, they had contemplated leaving the entire idea behind and moving towards something that was better, but they continued along. This was until after two years, when they realized it was best to shut down the entire idea and stop forcing people to do something that wasn't working out.
In a post on Google's official authorship support page, the comapny announced that "authorship markup is no longer supported as a part of web search. The feature launched in 2011, and it was designed to allow writers to claim content that they have written, and also to help them gain followers. The feature made it obvious who had written each article, and authors benefited from increased click-through rates when their images appeared in the SERPs. Google aimed to provide an Author Rank feature that would filter out low quality articles by scoring the reputation of authors based on the quality of past content that they had posted.
A lot of feedback has been received over the past few years from both webmasters and general public when it comes to this feature. Yet, not everyone is happy with what the system has done with Google and this is why they decided to let it go. They had the feedback that was necessary to gauge what the market wanted.
John Mueller of Google stated that their data showed no significant difference in the click rates of results with photo an author byline and those without. Briefly, this means users don't care about such details, therefore it doesn't make sense to invest resources in providing them anymore.
John Meuller, the Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google said on Thursday that from a huge amount of useful feedback received from a wide variety of users and webmasters, the display of authorship information was constantly updated, tweaked and honed for recognition. Unfortunately, it was also observed that authorship information was not as useful to web searchers as the company hoped it would be and it became necessary to make the difficult decision to stop displaying authorship information in search results.
Tests conducted by Google found that the removal of authorship information did not appear to affect results like reducing traffic to websites, nor did there appear to be an increase in clicks on ads. Google has assured users that Google+ posts from friends, where they are relevant to search queries, will not be affected by the change.
In a post on Google's official authorship support page, the comapny announced that "authorship markup is no longer supported as a part of web search. The feature launched in 2011, and it was designed to allow writers to claim content that they have written, and also to help them gain followers. The feature made it obvious who had written each article, and authors benefited from increased click-through rates when their images appeared in the SERPs. Google aimed to provide an Author Rank feature that would filter out low quality articles by scoring the reputation of authors based on the quality of past content that they had posted.
A lot of feedback has been received over the past few years from both webmasters and general public when it comes to this feature. Yet, not everyone is happy with what the system has done with Google and this is why they decided to let it go. They had the feedback that was necessary to gauge what the market wanted.
John Mueller of Google stated that their data showed no significant difference in the click rates of results with photo an author byline and those without. Briefly, this means users don't care about such details, therefore it doesn't make sense to invest resources in providing them anymore.
John Meuller, the Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google said on Thursday that from a huge amount of useful feedback received from a wide variety of users and webmasters, the display of authorship information was constantly updated, tweaked and honed for recognition. Unfortunately, it was also observed that authorship information was not as useful to web searchers as the company hoped it would be and it became necessary to make the difficult decision to stop displaying authorship information in search results.
Tests conducted by Google found that the removal of authorship information did not appear to affect results like reducing traffic to websites, nor did there appear to be an increase in clicks on ads. Google has assured users that Google+ posts from friends, where they are relevant to search queries, will not be affected by the change.
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