Subscribe Via RSSGoogle Authorship is Officially Dead
On the 28 Aug 2014, John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, announced that Google will be discontinuing the authorship experiment that it has been running for the past three years. Support for authorship in search results is no more.
- This follows the dropping of author photos from search result in June 2014, in order to reduce clutter in the design, according to Mueller.
He states, “We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results”.
- This announcement means the rel=author markup will no longer be tracked on websites.
Although the authorship schema is no longer used to identify a post’s author in search results, Mueller says there’s no need to be in a rush to remove it from your code. “We’re no longer using it for authorship, we treat it like any other markup on your pages. Leaving it is fine, it won’t cause problems (and perhaps your users appreciate being able to find out more about you through your profile too),” he said.
Mueller emphasized that even though authorship is being discontinued, Google will continue its support for structured markup: “Going forward, we’re strongly committed to continuing and expanding our 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”.
- All four major search engines are backing schema.org. They’re used, for instance, in the creation of rich snippets with ratings and prices. See AJ Kohn’s article, The Rich Snippets Algorithm for more information.
What does this mean for WordPress users? Well, if you’re using a WordPress plugin that adds authorship to your site for SEO purposes, you are safe to disable it.
Finally, if you have any thoughts or suggestions relating to Google Authorship, don’t forget to let me have them in the comment box below. Thanks for dropping by.
