9 ms·
Google removes authorship from search results
- Kortaggio 12y agoIt seems to me that Google's motivation for starting author snippets in search was to drive more people to sign up for Google Plus. Now that they've discovered it's either (1) not working, or (2) enough people have already signed up for G+, it makes sense to keep search uncluttered from the UX standpoint. You can see this steady move away from authorship snippets starting from when they first removed profile pictures.[1] [1] https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j
- graeme 12y agoCertainly got me using it, a bit. I started adding everyone I knew to circles, in the hope that it might improve my author rank marginally. I likewise made sure to connect buffer to google+ and not neglect that platform for business social media posts.
- themodelplumber 12y agoMe too. I did everything required to get my authorship to show up. Now that it's gone, it's kind of frustrating to have put in the effort. Just like it's frustrating to have no less than seven different g+ public interfaces, between my work account, business page, newer personal gmail account, older personal gmail account, account being used by my wife and myself, and these weird alternate Youtube versions of two or three of the above. I called a client today to discuss them signing up for webmaster tools. The most frustrating part of the conversation was a discussion about dealing with the other Google "stuff" that comes with the new Google account they'll be making. Do they want to use the new email address for anything? What if it accidentally gets out? Etc.
- graeme 12y agoThat was the strangest part for me. Google+ forced an odd hybrid between my personal and business activities, but it wasn't absolute. I couldn't tell you how many google interfaces I have right now, I'd have to count them and go through a few while logged in to make sure it was complete. It wasn't that much work, but I suspect they could have improved their user testing on how multiple identities worked. Maybe they were just targeting the median user, but that is likely a mistake if you miss all the evangelists.
- aiiane 12y agoNote that you can sign up for a Google account without signing up for GMail. Just click the "I prefer to use my current email address" link underneath the username box in the signup flow.
- joelrunyon 12y agoOr 3) It's working so well that people are gravitating towards it rather than clicking on paid links (most probable reasoning).
- alanfalcon 12y agoNot very charitable to either dismiss as a lie this section of the post[1] or else to comment without having read the short post at all. [1] (If you’re curious -- in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.)
- joelrunyon 12y agoI'm curious what their metric was for "user experience." I did read that portion - but anyone who's done any work in search for very long knows that's google's response to most thing (the recent removal of exact match in ppc is meant to make the platform more accessible, but really just increases impressions / clicks by default and removes the fine tuning that you could do on an advanced level).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Donzo 12y agoMaybe it's my ugly mug or the particular type of content that I serve, but having authorship markup drove my traffic down 1/3rd. I'm happy to see it go.
- fmavituna 12y agoCan't you just disable it? I thought it was opt-in.
- blueskin_ 12y agoGoogle's love of metro-ifying everything and removing useful features clashes with google's love of foisting google+ onto unwilling users. Civil war, anyone?
- IBM 12y agoWhat was the last Google product that was successful without heavy bundling? In this case, bundling couldn't overcome Facebook's network effects.
- gress 12y agoGoogle Maps
- x0x0 12y agoFeb 2005 [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps
- adventured 12y agoGmail likely could have stood alone as a product (that is, I don't think it required promotion on google.com). It was a tremendous innovation at the time, on both interface, usability, and storage capacity. It leapfrogged hotmail by 100 fold on storage.
- x0x0 12y agoApr 2004 [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail
- adventured 12y agoI have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Or what it has to do with what I said. I've been a user of Gmail since it entered beta. What's your point exactly? If you have something to say, say it, don't be smug by linking to a wikipedia entry for Gmail, as though I don't already know what year it was created.
- unreal37 12y agoHis not so subtle point is that it's been 10 years since Gmail, and if that was the last successful non-bundled product, that was a long time ago.
- codezero 12y agoI wonder why he says it's a difficult decision? What was the upside to users or authors? If the data shows this is an improved experience for users it should be a given and not difficult or something to apologize for.
- esolyt 12y agoBecause they spent time working on it.
- michaelhoffman 12y agoRight, and they also convinced web publishers to spend time working on it.
- unreal37 12y agoAgreed. Authorship was supposed to be a revolution in search marketing. Author Rank was the new Page Rank. It was the Next Big Thing (TM). And now it's dead.
- codezero 12y agoSo this is a clear issue of misaligned priorities between content seekers and content providers I guess. I'm very very glad they went with the optimum for content seekers in this case.
- michaelhoffman 12y agoIt's less that the priorities are misaligned, and more that Google wasted the time of the content providers by recommending that they do something that is no longer going to be used.
- codezero 12y agoGoogle is constantly changing the way results show up and ranking and content creators are always shuffling to get ahead, I don't see how this is any different from something like say, Panda, or any other periodic change to how Google presents information. I get your point though.
- simonw 12y agohttp://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975 http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975 is a good piece covering the history of this feature.
- x0x0 12y agoI wonder if this is to get in front of anti-trust actions. They where clearly using their search duopoly (US) and monopoly (EU) to juice google+.
- nkuttler 12y agoI seriously doubt that, it should have been pretty easy to integrate other services besides G+. The truth is probably that authorship info sucks for many users, and this isn't news either https://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship-decreased-our-traffic-by-90/ https://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship-decrea...
- BorisMelnik 12y agoDid authorship truly help anyone from an ROI or branding perspective? The entire thing seemed like a huge failed experiment. I am sure it was just removed because it took too much attention away from AdWords.
- archemike_ 12y agoI've seen noticeable CTR on numerous campaigns with authorship as a great picture would grab more attention. Maybe a 3-8% swing which is noticeable on keywords with search volume >1000
- joelrunyon 12y agoThis stuff is really bothersome because they didn't ask nicely - they forced all google users to use G+. In doing so, they screwed up a bunch of perfectly fine services. Now they're trying to un-screw-up what they spent the last 3 years doing and pretend like it's not a big deal. I mean, I get it - Google can do what Google wants, but it doesn't do much for their brand loyalty.
- reidrac 12y agoIn some of the products there's not need to worry as there's not competence. Well, it's basically search the service it doesn't really matter what they do.
- aaronbrethorst 12y agoIt’s also worth mentioning that Search users will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query — both in the main results, and on the right-hand side. Today’s authorship change doesn’t impact these social features. I don't think I've ever seen any of this before... Probably a testament to how little I and my friends use G+. Has anyone else ever seen one of these? What do they look like?
- kalleboo 12y ago> Has anyone else ever seen one of these? What do they look like? Just did a test search and got some. http://mayoyo.tokyo/jyL.jpg http://mayoyo.tokyo/jyL.jpg First result is organic, next two are G+ users I have in my circles. They don't show up if I log out and perform the same search.
- on_and_off 12y agoI have seen these. I use G+ heavily, there is a great Android dev community that use it to communicate. I sometimes stumble on a post that matches my google search query. It is extremely useful and does not feel invasive since it matches my query. It just appears like a normal search result, with the contact picture.
- Turing_Machine 12y agoThe only time I've seen this is when I'm searching for more information on a topic that I've already written about and "shotgun shared" (FB, Twitter, G+...). Then it "helpfully" clutters up the search results with my own post. Suboptimal.
- spindritf 12y agoDoes google still recognize authorship? Many people in the SEO/marketing community were really invested in the idea of AuthorRank and saw it as a natural next step after PageRank.
- nkuttler 12y agoThat's an excellent question. I mean, after all, social is the future of search, right? “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.” http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/02/01/the-future-according-to-eric-7-points/ http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/02/01/the-f...
- schnable 12y agoIn the comments, he says Google is not longer even processing the authorship data.
- rwhitman 12y agoI'm pretty glad that's over with. Authorship was a pain in the ass
- skynetv2 12y agoThis was a very useless "enhancement" to the search page and its sole purpose was to get more people signed up for G+ so they names and photos can be shown in search. For most users, a picture and name dont mean anything unless they are super famous or is an author the user follows closely. if the user loves that author, the user already knows which website is credible because authors typically are on one site they publish. some cross publish but in most cases, there is a primary site. so the user intrinsically knows what is a trustworthy result. even if we were to assign some weight to the author, as a user I dont need to know who wrote it. I trust Google to present me with trustworthy articles instead of wasting space and distracting my attention from the results. this was a very horrible move on Google's part along with a bunch of other useless "enhancements"
- billyhoffman 12y agoI disagree. You are blurring 2 concepts here, and are throwing out the baby with the bath water. Decouple the "social network" junk of Google+ from the concept of validated authorship. Authorship is valuable. Show me everything that Jane Example wrote. Yes, on her personal blog, but also in her column for Wired. And didn't she used to write for the WSJ, or the Guardian? Those too. Cite systems like this have existed in academia for over a decade. Google's entire existence, as well as PageRank, grew from Larry and Sergey's Backrub project at Stanford which, you guessed it, ranked academic papers and authors based on which other papers/authors cited them, and in turn how those papers/authors ranked. Authorship at the index/search level is more powerful and comprehensive that other approaches. Yes, Jane could keep a website with links to all her articles. How up-to-date is that? What happens when the WSJ redesigns and those links 404, even though her content still exists, just in a new location? The model shouldn't be "I am Jane, and I wrote this thing that's located over there." Authorship needs to be coupled to the content. I have not liked Google+ at all. But is a step backward to abandon the concept of authorship entirely.
- skynetv2 12y agoI'm taking specifically about linking authorship and Google+ and including photos in search results with names. Google can still make it possible to search by author without needing up search results.
- e15ctr0n 12y agoSo first Google+ drops its real name policy [0] and now it's removing forced integration with Search results? Great to see the forced integration of Google+ with other Google properties being rolled back after Vic Gundotra's departure. Nice work, Googlers! What's next? [0] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy https://plus.google.com/u/0/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy
- fiatjaf 12y agoI must confess I skipped the results that had photos in them. I hate photos.