Over the past two years, Google put a lot of pressure to determine webmasters to add the rel=authorship markup to their pages. Despite their efforts, many webmasters misunderstood the way of applying the markup, therefore the implementation was often flawed and full of errors.
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.
Sadly, the feature didn't work out as well as expected, and after playing with authorship for three years, Google finally decided to cull the feature. They have been gradually decreasing the prominence of authorship over the last few months, leading to speculation that the feature was due to be culled. In June they removed Google+ profile photos from the search results, and also stopped showing Google+ follower counts.
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.
It's not clear if the Google authorship is gone forever. It is possible that the concept of semantic search may reveal other ways of identifying authors of various online documents. So far, it is clear that methods that involve actions from humans, namely webmasters, are more or less doomed, since humans are subject to errors and misunderstandings more than we would like to admit. Automation can make this identification much more reliable, so it is possible to see some new approaches in this direction coming from Google engineers and technicians.
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.
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.
Sadly, the feature didn't work out as well as expected, and after playing with authorship for three years, Google finally decided to cull the feature. They have been gradually decreasing the prominence of authorship over the last few months, leading to speculation that the feature was due to be culled. In June they removed Google+ profile photos from the search results, and also stopped showing Google+ follower counts.
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.
It's not clear if the Google authorship is gone forever. It is possible that the concept of semantic search may reveal other ways of identifying authors of various online documents. So far, it is clear that methods that involve actions from humans, namely webmasters, are more or less doomed, since humans are subject to errors and misunderstandings more than we would like to admit. Automation can make this identification much more reliable, so it is possible to see some new approaches in this direction coming from Google engineers and technicians.
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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