Authorship is Dead. Long Live Authorship!
After significantly scaling back Authorship in June by dropping author photos from search, Google has finally driven the last nail into its coffin. In a Google+ post announcement by Webmaster Tools Engineer John Mueller on August 28, it was announced that all authorship functionality would soon come to an end, including the tracking of any rel=authorship markup data.
Authorship, the bold experiment started three years ago by Google as a universal identity platform to connect authors with their content, now joins the ranks of the dozens of other discontinued products and services that have been sunset by the company over the years.
Adios authorship, we hardly knew you.
So what happened? According to Google, and their ruthless internal testing metrics, Authorship failed for three major reasons:
- Low Adoption Rate: Even after three years, Authorship was not widely embraced by influencers, SEOs and the regular Google user. The major complaint being it was “too difficult.” Google attempted, starting in 2012, to help “spur” the adoption of authorship results by implementing auto-attribution but this resulted in many instances of incorrect attribution, some quite hilarious.
- Low Value to Users: According to Google’s internal testing, authorship snippets reported no discernible increase in CTR over other results on the page. This caused a lot of consternation in the SEO community since many believed just the opposite: results with profile pics were getting clicked more in relation to non-authored results.
- Dilution of Mobile Experience: Google believed that authorship snippets took away from their goal to ruthlessly optimize for the mobile user. Mobile devices have both limited bandwidth and screen size making it difficult to display full authorship snippets. And even with Google, ther...
