By now you’ve probably heard the news. Google has ended its Authorship program. For those of us who have been paying close attention to Google Authorship over the last year or so, this shouldn’t have come out of nowhere.
During Pubcon 2013, Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts delivered a keynote speech where he claimed that Google would be “looking for a 15% reduction to ensure that the quality of the authorship is still high and relevant.” By December Google made good on the promise as author photo snippets began to decrease.
By June, Google removed all author photos in global search. In a Google+ post, Google’s John Mueller stated that the decision to remove author photos was to simplify “the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results.”
So, why exactly did Google finally pull the plug on this experiment?
Read more here – via End of Google Authorship – Forbes.
