Google removes authorship from search results

https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8

by iamben • 12 years ago

116 75 12 years ago

plus.google.com

Kortaggio• 12 years ago

It 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

graeme3• 12 years ago

Certainly 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• 12 years ago

Me 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.

joelrunyon3• 12 years ago

Or 3) It's working so well that people are gravitating towards it rather than clicking on paid links (most probable reasoning).

alanfalcon• 12 years ago

Not 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.)

Donzo• 12 years ago

Maybe 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• 12 years ago

Can't you just disable it? I thought it was opt-in.

blueskin_2• 12 years ago

Google's love of metro-ifying everything and removing useful features clashes with google's love of foisting google+ onto unwilling users. Civil war, anyone?

rch• 12 years ago

The war's been over a while now, and it resulted in some high-profile leadership changes. This is just further evidence of a new direction.

lnanek22• 12 years ago

Fortunately, G+ has been losing lately.

IBM• 12 years ago

What was the last Google product that was successful without heavy bundling? In this case, bundling couldn't overcome Facebook's network effects.

gress• 12 years ago

Google Maps

x0x08• 12 years ago

Feb 2005 [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps

adventured3• 12 years ago

Gmail 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.

x0x08• 12 years ago

Apr 2004 [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail

rodgerd2• 12 years ago

Depends on whether you consider Android a Google product or not.

x0x08• 12 years ago

Do you believe android succeeded w/o juicing from other google businesses? I don't, I think.

The forced bundling of gmail, calendar, and maps (w/ turn-by-turn) where critical to android's success imo. Though I'd be curious for an argument otherwise.

antoko• 12 years ago

I guess that would depend on your definitions of "product", "successful" and "heavy". Realistically if they are in a position to leverage any bundling - why wouldn't they?

But here goes, in no particular order...

Google Public DNS - Dec 2009

Chromecast - July 2013

Chromebook - June 2011

Chrome Browser - Sept 2008

ChromeOS - May 2012

Nexus 4,5,7,10 - various starting Jan 2010

Golang - 2009

Dart - 2011

AngularJS - 2009

app engine - April 2008

x0x08• 12 years ago

Because leveraging bundling is illegal, if the bundled item is a monopoly, in both the US [1] and the EU. Further, leveraging their search monopoly in such a way as to juice other products is to the detriment of users: if the product deserves a given space in the search results (where deserves means would rise there without bundling), it should rise there on its own, or there is a better alternative that should have been there instead. Hence user harm.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

lnanek22• 12 years ago

Would anyone really consider AppEngine successful? I hear so many support horror stories, only one poorly supported open source project to try to move off to without recoding to different APIs, and the price is ridiculous compared to other cloud providers...

codezero4• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Because they spent time working on it.

michaelhoffman2• 12 years ago

Right, and they also convinced web publishers to spend time working on it.

PhasmaFelis2• 12 years ago

Because not everyone has the same use cases. A positive change for most users can be a negative for a few, and you don't ever want to be perceived as saying "We're super excited to be screwing you, 'cause we don't care about your needs!"

codezero4• 12 years ago

Yeah, I'm most curious about who is negatively affected by this.

simonw• 12 years ago

http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975 is a good piece covering the history of this feature.

x0x08• 12 years ago

I 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+.

nkuttler2• 12 years ago

I 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-decrea...

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

Did 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_• 12 years ago

I'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

joelrunyon3• 12 years ago

This 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• 12 years ago

In 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• 12 years ago

    It’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?

kalleboo2• 12 years 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

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• 12 years ago

I 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_Machine2• 12 years ago

The 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• 12 years ago

Does 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.

nkuttler2• 12 years ago

That'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-f...

schnable• 12 years ago

In the comments, he says Google is not longer even processing the authorship data.

rwhitman• 12 years ago

I'm pretty glad that's over with. Authorship was a pain in the ass

skynetv22• 12 years ago

This 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• 12 years ago

I 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.

skynetv22• 12 years ago

I'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• 12 years ago

So 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

fiatjaf• 12 years ago

I must confess I skipped the results that had photos in them. I hate photos.

Google removes authorship from search results

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