John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools recently released a statement through his Google+ of Google’s removal of authorship in search results. After three years and much testing, updating and tweaking, Mueller shared that “we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.” It was found that including authorship was neither helpful or harmful for search results.
As always, the change is made based on the goal of always improving the users’ experience. It has been found that so far the removal of authorship has shown little to no negativity in terms of traffic to sites or clicks on ads. Search results will still include Google+ posts from friends and pages when relevant, so these changes will not impact the social aspect of G+, according to Mueller.
Mueller also shared that while Google Authorship has been dropped, they will continue their efforts in “support of structured markup (such as schema.org). This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web…As always, we’ll keep expanding and improving the set of free tools we provide to make it easier for you to optimize your sites.”
