Google Says Goodbye to Authorship

In many senses Google is the heart of the Internet.

With more than 11 billion searches made each month, Google has a lot of influence over users' Web experience. When Google introduced Authorship, writers from all over the world were wondering how they could increase their Authorship ranking so their picture and name could be placed next to their articles in search results. Now, however, writers no longer have to worry.

John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, announced yesterday on his Google+ page that the search engine is saying goodbye to their short lived Authorship project.

(Original Authorship results)

(After Drop of Image)

Search results will no longer contain any information on the author of articles but will still display the dates at which they were written.

(Current search engine results look)

"I've been involved since we first started testing authorship markup and displaying it in search results. 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," stated Mueller in his blog post.

"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."