Google Authorship in web-search is no longer supported as recently stated on the official Google Webmaster Authorship page. The discontinuation of Google authorship was confirmed by John Mueller on Google+ on August 28, 2014. John Mueller states that “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“.
In the future, Google is “strongly committed to continuing and expanding the support of structured markup (such as schema.org). 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“. Now the run of SEO (Search engine optimisation) will go ahead to structured markup. And what’s next in a few months? Will Google then stop support of structured markup, too?
In addition, John Mueller confirms “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“.
In my personal opinion, Google is voluntarily giving up a uniqueness in search results. The Google authorship personalised search and gave the search users a face-to-face feeling. The personal contact is the plus and success factor of social media. And so is was with Google authorship in search results. Just analysing data is not the right way to judge a user behaviour….
Stay tuned! 😉