Google’s John Mueller: no more authorship results

In a post on Google+, Google’s John Mueller announced that Google does not display authorship information in the results anymore:

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. […]

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. […]

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.”

Although authorship support was dropped, John Mueller also said that websites should use structured markup:

Going forward, we’re strongly committed to continuing and expanding our support of structured markup. This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.

The Rich Snippet Creator in SEOprofiler helps you to create structured markup code for your web pages. If you haven’t done it yet, create your free SEOprofiler account now:

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