Google Kills Authorship in SERPs after Realising It Wasn’t Useful

Search Engine giants Google have made a number of changes to how their organic search engine results are displayed over recent years, introducing schema mark-up, authorship and the much discussed implementation of revenue generating ‘information' boxes such as those seen on credit card searches.

Well it seems that although the changes were thought to be made to improve the user experience, Google have established that sometimes the changes that they make simply don't improve the experience that their users have while using their search engine, taking a bold step backwards as they announced that they were switching off the authorship feature after they realised that "this information isn't as useful to our users" as they had hoped.

With a retraction of authorship information seeming to have been a gradual process following the removal of author pictures from the SERPs previously, the next step was to eliminate the authorship name element from the results and Google's John Mueller explained that the changes were more than simply UI based, stating that Google were "no longer processing this information".

When asked about whether the latest development would mean that Google Plus related stories would now reduce within the results of those that hold you within their ‘circles', Mueller explained that the removal of authorship would not affect the appearance of Google Plus results within the closed community that follow a specific person or brand, the change was more focused towards the search engine results of their main users.

Although Google have taken a step back away from authorship being present within their organic results, they have continued to display their ‘sponsored' boxes within the SERPs for search queries that allow them to further increase their revenues, such as this one that is displayed when a user searches for "credit card".

Questions are now being asked whether the changes could be spark the reduction of popularity for Google's Plus platform as the search giants remove the reason that some many users initially created their account and that is still to be seen.