What's In A Name?: Google Authorship No More

What's In A Name?: Google Authorship No More

Google has bid adieu to Google Authorship recently. The farewell is final for Google will now case to display the name of the author when the search engine retrieves articles. This is a sound move considering that the Google Authorship project could not meet its aim.

The motive behind the Google Authorship project which had been launched around 3 years ago was to tie the work of authors online with their Google account. The search results would then display the author's face along with what they have written on the websites. But rather than putting a face to the name, the project met with a massive roadblock.

Google’s search engine had stopped displaying profile pics and Google Plus details to integrate the mobile and desktop experiences, according to a report by Endgadget. What happened was that the Authorship snippets occupied too much space on the screen of the cell phone. With screens getting smaller and time getting scarcer, users have little use for an author's details. With the new move by Google, the author's name will be AWOL from the search results.

“We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users,” Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller has mentioned in his blog post “Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those [search] results.”

In-depth studies from Search Engine Land reveal that authors simply made no effort to connect the authorship with the content published on leading websites. Possibly, many authors may even wish to remain anonymous or use pseudonyms for privacy reasons. After all, the virtual world is as public as it is unforgiving and expressing opinions online or even offline for the matter can alert the thought police.

Thought crimes may be a laughing matter for some, but others may not want to even play the game. Jokes apart, Mueller found that Google Authorship is not translating into profits either saying “In our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads.”

Google Search users will be able to see Google Plus posts from friends and pages when it concerns a particular query only. The company will no longer be displaying author's names anymore and authorship will not be used by the algorithm either. Ghost writing just became more mainstream, in a way.

“We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information,” Mueller added on his Google+ page. What Google has found is that people now choose to go to certain websites rather than relying on posts by any specific author. Media groups would do well to spruce up their websites if they want to boost readership. As far as writers are concerned though, name has ceased to matter at least for now. What clearly seems to be most important is quality of content. Any old story just won't do, regardless of whether it is a mock tale or a real one.