Saying Goodbye to Google Authorship

As of August 2014, Google announced the Authorship Program will no longer affect search results, effectively killing off Google Authorship completely. Google Authorship was first unveiled by Google in June of 2011, allowing content to be connected to a specific author’s profile.

And when Google+ was introduced at the end of June 2011, it helped connect Google Authorship in a way to link an author’s Google+ profile to their content within the search results. Google’s thought was that if content displaying the author’s picture and name appeared in the search results, the content would draw more clicks.

After three years of experimentation, Google felt the need to kill the Authorship Program for a couple of reasons. The first reason: because authors and webmaster were not adopting it. Even when websites adopted the program, they didn’t implement or use it correctly. Second, Google noticed that the Authorship Program did little to increase clicks when compared to content that didn’t utilize Google Authorship. In some cases, Google authorship could even detract from the results.

What exactly does this change mean for businesses practicing content marketing?

While Google Authorship is going away, the idea of author rank will continue to be observed as a possible factor in search rank for the SEO community. Author Rank is the idea that if Google knows who wrote a story, it will alter ranks based on the trustworthiness of the author and their content. The term “Author Rank” was created by the SEO community – not by Google.

In his 2013 book The New Digital Age, Google’s Eric Schmidt spoke of an idea where Google increased search rank for content by verified authors. Eric Schmidt’s idea was labeled by the SEO community as author rank. Author Rank has loosely been confirmed by Google’s web spam team that it infrequently affects rank in the in-depth articles section. So while Author Rank isn’t technically confirmed to impact search results, business owners and marketers should still remain aware of its existence.

So what has Google told us?

Google has said that the elimination of Google Authorship won’t affect how authors will be rewarded; meaning Google has may have other ways of determining the author of a story that were probably created before Google Authorship was established. A lot of people think that Google searches for some type of bylines or a place where the author has their name. Even though right now we don’t know for sure, when it comes to content marketing, the most important factors for businesses are to continue generating quality content that you as an author can proud of, and to produce content that matter to your customers and your industry.

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Saying Goodbye to Google Authorship