Here’s some news about a recent change in Google that was strongly recommended in recent months.
We have been advising clients about the benefits of using Authorship mark-up (a Google experiment over the last three years) for their content. Most recently Google announced that they would be removing author photos from search results as:
[one_half]
– There wasn’t data to support improved CTR to a website
– They did not provide a good mobile experience
Now it has been announced that in addition to the above points that:
– The uptake of Authorship implementation has been weak
– Many of those that did implement it had done so incorrectly
[/one_half] [one_half_last]
[/one_half_last]The result is that Google will no longer show Authorship snippets in the search result pages, nor will they be using data from content that uses rel=author metadata.
It should be noted that this does not affect Publisher mark-up.
Google constantly launches new features and products and oftentimes these are killed off if they are not feasible after testing (either from lack of adoption or lack of user value). Remember these?
– Knol
– Google Wave
– Google Reader
– iGoogle
More information can be found on John Mueller’s Google+ post:
If you have any questions please feel free to contact us!
