RIP Google Authorship Program.
The much hyped Google Authorship Program that promoted the use of personal Google+ credentials, is now officially over.
The shocking news was delivered by John Mueller who spear-headed the project at Google Webmaster Tools, in an emotionally charged blog post:
“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. 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. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.”
What that means is, that if you more or less took advantage of your Google+ authority as an author to promote your ramblings as a blogger, there will be no more of this; what used to be a great promotion of content placed high in the results will now end in obscurity, unless your web site already receives plenty of Google juice.
This is another reason not to write content as if you are focused on a particular audience, but rather deliver your content as if the entire world – Google included – were to eventually read it.
For more information on the termination of the Google Authorship Program, click here.
