End of Google Authorship

By now you've probably heard the news. Google has ended its Authorship program. For those of us who have been paying close attention to Google Authorship over the last year or so, this shouldn't have come out nowhere.

During Pubcon 2013, Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts delivered a keynote speech where he claimed that Google would be 'looking for a 15% reduction to ensure that the quality of the authorship is still high and relevant.' By December Google made good on the promise as author photo snippets began to decrease.

By June, Google removed all author photos in global search. In a Google+ post, Google's John Mueller stated that the decision to remove author photos was to simplify 'the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results.'

So, why exactly did Google finally pull the plug on this experiment?

The idea behind Google Authorship seemed extremely promising when it patented Agent Rank/Author Rank back in 2007. The idea was to influence page rankings based on the reputation of its authors by using digital signatures. So, trusted agents would receive a higher score than someone who hadn't yet earned their stripes.

This was just an idea until June 2011. During this time Google began to encourage webmasters to use the rel='author' and rel='me' tags for pieces of content that an author wrote. When Google+ was unveiled, the entire Google Authorship plan came together is there was a way to connect content with its authors.

Within the first year, the experiment seemed promising. Searchmetrics found that 17% of SERPs were showing the rel=author tag, which was higher than expected. Unfortunately, Authorship didn't take off as expected.

Stone Temple Consulting discovered in a recent study that 70% of authors made no effort in connecting their content with authorship. In addition to that staggering figure, out of 150 pages sampled, 50 did not have author pages, while ¾ gave no attribution to an author. Furthermore, there were issues with confusing authors and containing no links to Google+ profiles.

On Google's end, however, the decision to finally end Authorship came down to two-decisions, which John Mueller explained to Search Engine Land.

Low Adoption Rates by Webmaster and Authors

If Google was discovering similar information that Stone Temple Consulting had during their study, then this is a pretty obvious reason. Participation wasn't as high as Google had hoped for. In fact, this was the case ever since 2012, despite Searchmetrics being impressed by the amount of participants.

Mark Traphagen used Forbes list of the 50 Most Influential Social Media Marketers and discovered that 'only 30% used authorship markup on their own blogs.' On top of that, there was also embarrassing instances of Google attributing an article to the wrong - see Truman Capote credited as writing a New York Times writer 28 years after his death.

Provided Low Value for Searchers

Going back to Mueller's post in June when he announced that author photos were no longer going to be used in global search, he also made it clear that Google had noticed 'little difference in 'click behavior' on search result pages with Authorship snippets compared to those without.'

Many of us were taken aback by that claim since it was always believed that author snippets were increasing click-through rates.

Apparently, Google's data proved otherwise. In his post declaring the end of Authorship, Mueller stated that Google's research has found that displayed author information 'isn't as useful to our users as we'd hoped, and can even distract from those results.'

What's Next?

The idea behind Google Authorship was solid. It provided authenticity immediately for users who were searching for trusted members of a niche. And while that didn't work for Authorship, what's not to say that Google Knowledge Vault won't deliver that sense of authenticity.

And, as John Mueller explained, Google will continue to expand '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, and we'll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.'

Authorship as we all know and love it as may be gone today, but it could come back even better and stronger in the near future.

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