Google to Stop Displaying Authorship in Search Results
In a recent post, Google's trend analyst John Mueller stated that the search engine will no longer be displaying authorship in its results list. According to the same source, the company observed that author-related information isn't as useful to its users as they were hoping for.
First introduced in 2011, authorship was supposed to help people easily navigate to content published by their favorite authors and offer a simple way to filter search results by associating them to the previously established reliability of the source. After three years of experimentation, Google's conclusion is that the authorship information in the search results has almost no impact on the overall user activity. It doesn't really influence the traffic on websites, and it has little to no weight on how often ads are clicked. Since the only purpose of authorship was to make Google's search engine a friendlier environment for its users, the company saw no point in keeping this feature.
Google Authorship
According to Mr. Mueller, the main reasons why authorship didn't pan out to be a success were the small implementation rate (very few authors and webmasters have adopted the process) and the low value of the searches (the insignificant difference between clicks on links with and without authors).
The changes will not impact the social features, so you will still be able to see search-related Google+ posts from friends and websites in the main results as well as in the right-hand side of the screen.
