By Natalie Stoner
Adios, Authorship!
Google has just announced that Authorship is officially finished. What began in June as the removal of the photos in Google searches, has turned into full fledged elimination of Google Authorship functionality.
Google determined that this 3 year old Webmaster Tool was distracting and unhelpful to users. Google has officially removed it from Webmaster Tools and will no longer be tracking rel=author tag data. John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools cites poor adoption and lack of usefulness as the primary reasons for giving this functionality the ax. Many users had difficulty getting Authorship set up properly and as a result overall participation was low. After rigorous testing it became evident that the Authorship functionality offered little value to users and wasn’t influencing click rates as much as Google had anticipated either. Combined, these two issues were enough to cause Webmaster Tools to drop Authorship altogether.
References: