Google Authorship markup is no longer supported in web search. Yes you heard it right. On August 30, 2014 Google proclaimed that it has eliminated Google Authorship from the search results. Google Authorship has proposed a way to link content you create with a Google+ profile. Google Authorship is rooted in the 2007’s Google’s Agent Rank patent and since then it was serving the web master tool and therefore from now onwards, Google won’t be tracking content by means of “rel=author” markup anymore.Google has dropped all the authorship functionalities from the webmaster tool labs.
Reason for cessation of Google Authorship
Low adoption rates
It has been felt that for the non-tech-savvy site owners or authors felt the markup and linking were too multifarious, and therefore unlikely to try to implement it.It has led to low adoption of Google authorship among webmaster and authors. Although in the beginning of 2012,Google started attempting to auto-attribute authorship in some case. But from the study of a Forbes list of 50 Most Influential Social Media Marketers, in a November 2012. Mark noticed that only 30% used authorship markup on their own blogs, but of those without any markup, 34% were still getting an Authorship rich snippet in search.
Low value to searchers
In the later June of 2014, when John Mueller announced the elimination of author photo from the Google search, he has observed a little difference. The difference was in click behavior. If Google does continue to show author photos in personalized results, it would look as ifGoogle data is showing that when content is from someone with whom the searcher has some special association, a rich snippet actually provide value to that searcher.
From the above new it felt like nothing from Google is immortal. Apparently, Google always kept shuffling its products or services. It could be probably because Googletest and evaluate each product with time and if there is anything that does not satisfy with Google’s goals would neither bring sufficient user adoptionnor render notable user worth, ultimately gets axed by Google.
So, for now GoogleAuthorship is no more but yes as Google comes up with its new product and service. I sure this time also Google will shock us with its new service very soon. With a tremendous experiment and innovation Google will bring something better than Google Authorship in future.