Much to the dismay of journalists and bloggers, Google will no longer be showing authorship references in its search results.
Google Authorship, which essentially displayed a picture of the writer next to the article headline in Google's search results, only had a lifespan of three years, being introduced in 2011.
"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," said Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller in a Google+ 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 results. With this in mind, we've made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results."
While many journalists have expressed concern over the decision, Google has said that the feature has little to no impact on a page's views, meaning that perhaps there is little reason for journalists to be worried.
Google launched Authorship at around the same time that it launched Google+, giving the impression that the feature was largely design to entice users to follow authors on Google+. With Google+ not doing as well as Google had hoped, it makes sense that Authorship would get the ax.
In fact, Google has been removing a number of features associated with Google+ over the past few months. In June, Google announced that it would remove things like Google+ profile photos and the Google+ follower account from search results.
Google also announced that it would be separating Google+ photos, one of Google+'s most popular features, from Google+. This effectively means that people can use Google+ photos regardless of whether or not they have a Google+ profile. Google is also starting to allow some business customers who don't have a Google+ account to use Hangouts videoconferencing.
It is important to remember that users will still likely see Google Authorship style search results. For example, profile pictures will still be shown next to Google+ posts as long as the person is part of your circles and you are logged in to your Google account.
The decision to remove Google Authorship comes after Google ran a number of tests related to the feature. In a test involving 500 authors across 150 major websites, only 151 authors had Google Authorship properly set up. Not only that, but click-through rates barely even changed, regardless of whether Authorship snippets were shown or not.
