Google has announced it is completely shutting down its authorship feature because it ‘isn’t as useful to users’ as the search engine hoped.
The complete removal of rel= “author” byline follows the removal of author photos from search results back in June.
Two years after its launch the search engine believes its time to shut the functionality down completely believing it is unhelpful to users – even distracting them from results.
In a Google+ post John Muller, webmaster trends analyst at Google, reassured webmasters: ‘If you’re curious – in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.’
However, the brand has decided to keep the authorship features that impact its social media platform. Google+ users will still see posts from friends and pages when using the search engine.
