Webmasters, SEOs and content authors were all excited when Google launched authorship back in June 2011 which gave webmasters and content authors ability to link their Google+ profiles with their own content on the web.
The Dead End for authorship
Google’s Webmaster Trend Analyst John Muller announced this in a Google+ post on his Google+ profile. He said that Google monitored the data collected from webmasters and authors throughout the life of Google+ authorship, they came to conclusion that the feature is not that much useful to Google users.
John cited:
“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.”
What the Google+ authorship was?
This could also mean that users or readers when land on particular web page or blog post to read specific content, they would also see the Google+ profile link of its author and thus they can get to know the real person behind the content which could create trust for content’s genuineness.
The life and the death of Google+ authorship
Since the launch of Google+ authorship, Google kept rolling out new changes or adding/depriving features into/from its authorship snippet in the SERPs. Some time back in December 2013, Google started to reduce authorship appearance in SERPs to hit back at low quality sites while not much long time ago, in June 2014, in an update to authorship snippet, Google Stripped Off Profile Picture, Circle Counts From authorship Snippet In SERP.
The road ahead for rich snippet
However, rich snippet/schema.org markup will continue to life. Google is still and will continue to encourage webmasters to implement schema.org markup with make their websites even more user friendly and search engine friendly.
Your Thoughts
With Google removing authorship snippet from SERP, what do you think of the future of rich snippet? Do you think people, especially webmasters will continue to implement other elements of rich snippets into their websites? Share your thoughts on this with us in the comment box below.
