Google Authorship Failed
We, the people, will not have to worry about connecting an authorship indicator to our content to influence our Google rankings anymore.
Yesterday afternoon, John Mueller of Webmaster Tools announced on Google+ that Google Authorship will no longer be a ranking factor for Google’s search results.
Mueller says they, “made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results” because the information wasn’t as useful as they hoped.
As stated by Search Engine Land, Google ended Authorship program for two main reasons.
1) Low adoption rates by authors and webmasters
2) Low value to searchers
Recognize this?
These results were due to authorship. This meant authors used a digital signature (rel=author) in their content that linked to their profiles, creating a rich “snippet” of information that described what consumers would be clicking through to find.
According to Mueller, removing authorship did not reduce traffic to sites nor increase clicks on ads.
Google Webmaster Tools will continue to expand support for structured markup like Schema.org; a list for webmasters to follow in order to communicate to search engines more efficiently.
Agency Entourage stays on top of ranking factors for our SEO clients. Search engines are always changing, and we want to make sure you keep up too. Give us a shout to learn more about improving your business’ search engine ranks by emailing us your inquiries to info@agencyentourage.com.
Have a great day!
Account Coordinator at Agency Entourage
