Google has officially dropped authorship bylines from within the search results. In addition, Google will stop tracking content written by authors as tied by the author’s authorship profile.
John Mueller of Google said on Google+:
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. 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.
Earlier today, if a site deployed authorship, Google would show a link to the author’s profile, as displayed below:
Now, the authorship link has been removed:
Google launched authorship back in June 2011 and later that month, Google began showing author images in the search results. Two years later, Google dropped author images from the search results and now a couple months later, they have dropped the authorship bylink links completely from the search results.
John added:
Going forward, we’re strongly committed to continuing and expanding our support of structured markup (such as schema.org). This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results. It’s also worth mentioning that Search users will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query — both in the main results, and on the right-hand side. Today’s authorship change doesn’t impact these social features.
For more on this announcement, see the in-depth companion story on our Search Engine Land site, It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results.
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