Google Removes Authorship From Search Results

Webmaster trends analyst John Mueller wrote a Google+ post in which he said that Google has “made the difficult decision” to stop showing authorship in search results. While Google’s authorship support page simply states that, “Authorship is no longer supported in Web search”, and suggest that webmasters look into rich snippets to improve their search results, Mueller explains that Google’s tests indicated that removing authorship did not generally appear to reduce site traffic or increase ad clicks.

“I’ve been involved since we first started testing authorship markup and displaying it in search results,” wrote Mueller in his Google+ post. “We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. 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. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.”

Mueller’s post continues by stating that Google is “strongly committed” to expanding support of structured markup such as schema.org, and he says that Google will “continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results”.

This announcement of the end of the Authorship program comes after two major reductions of Authorship rich snippets over the past eight months. In December 2013, Google reduced the amount of author photo snippets shown per query.  Starting at that time, only some Authorship results were accompanied by an author photo, while all others had just a byline. Following this change, in June 2014, Google removed all author photos from global search, leaving just bylines for any qualified authorship results.

Some industry experts suspect that the rise of mobile may have played a role in this outcome. Using up valuable screen real estate for this type of markup on a mobile device may not be the best idea, and the growth of mobile may be at least part of the impetus for Google’s change.

In Mueller’s post, he thanks webmasters for their efforts to improve their sites, noting that, “We realize authorship wasn’t always easy to implement, and we greatly appreciate the effort you put into continually improving your sites for your users.” Mueller continued by explaining that Google Search users will continue to see Google+ posts from friends and pages when relevant within the main results and on the right-hand side. “Today’s authorship change doesn’t impact these social features,” wrote Mueller. “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.”