Goodbye Google Authorship! Google’s webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller, has
announced that Google will be dropping Google authorship mark up from the search engine results pages. This means that users will no longer be able to see the author’s name and photograph alongside their website.
When Google authorship was first announced, those in the seo world were very excited as this was a way to differentiate from competitors and highlight one website from another. However after being available for almost two years, Google have decided to pull the plug.
Google’s authorship support page, says simply, “Authorship mark-up is no longer supported in Web search,”
Google continually update their algorithms and test what works best. They found that by removing Google authorship, site traffic and ad clicks were not reduced.
“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,” said Mueller. “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.”
“We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience,” he notes.
At Dental Design, we strive to stay as up to date as possible with Google and their ever evolving algorithm, to ensure we can provide the best rankings possible for our clients. If you would like further information about search engine optimisation for your dental practice’s website, speak to a member of our team on: 01202 677 277 who will be happy to help you.