mercredi 17 septembre 2014

Authorship For Google Search Results Is Now Over

By Hajj Isa


Google started off asking everyone to add authorship to their web pages. It was a way to help progress the search results and help legitimize them. Google would rewards those who would add authorship to their pages. Yet, it didn't seem to do the trick as Google had wanted it to. Over the years, they had contemplated leaving the entire idea behind and moving towards something that was better, but they continued along. This was until after two years, when they realized it was best to shut down the entire idea and stop forcing people to do something that wasn't working out.



In a post on Google's official authorship support page, the comapny announced that "authorship markup is no longer supported as a part of web search. The feature launched in 2011, and it was designed to allow writers to claim content that they have written, and also to help them gain followers. The feature made it obvious who had written each article, and authors benefited from increased click-through rates when their images appeared in the SERPs. Google aimed to provide an Author Rank feature that would filter out low quality articles by scoring the reputation of authors based on the quality of past content that they had posted.

This was only the first of the two problems that determined Google to drop this initiative completely after three years of work. The second problem was that it didn't provide any real value to the end user. As Google needs to be wise about managing their processing power, wasting it to process and display information that's useless or of very little value to their users was a nonsense.

John Mueller of Google stated that their data showed no significant difference in the click rates of results with photo an author byline and those without. Briefly, this means users don't care about such details, therefore it doesn't make sense to invest resources in providing them anymore.

It's not clear if the Google authorship is gone forever. It is possible that the concept of semantic search may reveal other ways of identifying authors of various online documents. So far, it is clear that methods that involve actions from humans, namely webmasters, are more or less doomed, since humans are subject to errors and misunderstandings more than we would like to admit. Automation can make this identification much more reliable, so it is possible to see some new approaches in this direction coming from Google engineers and technicians.

Tests conducted by Google found that the removal of authorship information did not appear to affect results like reducing traffic to websites, nor did there appear to be an increase in clicks on ads. Google has assured users that Google+ posts from friends, where they are relevant to search queries, will not be affected by the change.




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