Google has decided to stop showing authorship references within search results — much to the dismay of journalists and writers, who require constant ego gratification.
The move to cancel Authorship, a means to identify the authors of articles in Google searches, was announced today by Google’s John Mueller via a Google+ update. The reason for dropping the Authorship program? Apparently, the information is not terribly useful to people who make search queries and has even distracted from the search results.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1539689,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,social,","session":"A"}']Mueller did, however, note that the presence of Authorship didn’t increase the traffic to articles, and similarly, removing them shouldn’t cause a dip in traffic either.
Google first started implementing Authorship around the time the company was trumpeting the launch of its social network Google+. I believe the idea behind Authorship was to entice people to follow authors on Google+ if they enjoyed the article. But since most people have abandoned Google+, this strategy probably doesn’t matter anymore — especially if authorship references indeed distracted from the search results as Mueller mentioned.
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