Google Officially Ends Authorship For Search Results

By Hajj Isa


Google has officially brought an end to the authorship system for search results. The search engine announced on Thursday that search results relating to articles will no longer have the names of authors associated with them.



Google will now not be looking at finding authors who have written on pages and connecting back to their profiles. They have decided this is not as helpful as it was supposed to be and most users are not interested in this information anyway. They key is quality content and that is going to remain for the foreseeable future when it comes to Google's algorithm. The content that has authorship will not be tracked for this specific characteristic any more like it used to over the past few years.

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.

The general observations being made about these updates stated that it was just not worthwhile for Google to focus on these details any more. It was better for Google to stop tweaking it and letting it die away before it caused further agony.

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.

However, after three years of experimenting with this feature, Google management has concluded that readers did not find it as valuable as they thought it would be and that it could even pose a distraction.




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