Authorship at Google is over!
Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2025 4:26 am
On Thursday, August 29th at 10:50 PM, John Mueller announced that Google was abandoning authorship . The company has decided to remove authorship features from search results.
No more “rel=author” attribute! This surprise announcement likely stems from the tool's overuse. Indeed, a study by the Cybercité agency reported a 40% increase in author photos in SERPs between February and March 2014. A second possible explanation for the abandonment of authorship is its influence on user search behavior. Results associated with an authorship tag generated three taiwan mobile database more clicks than "standard" results. We might also assume that this tag was competing with their AdWords advertising system in terms of visibility.
In 2011, this feature was created to allow authors to claim their content. The Mountain View giant concluded that it wasn't as valuable to its readers as it thought. In December 2013, Google reduced the size of author photos in search results before removing them entirely two months ago. These events were precursors to a planned death.
John Mueller, in his Google+ post, stated that the photos were removed because Google wanted to unify the user experience between desktop and mobile. Author photos didn't perform well on mobile (insufficient bandwidth and limited screen size).
No more “rel=author” attribute! This surprise announcement likely stems from the tool's overuse. Indeed, a study by the Cybercité agency reported a 40% increase in author photos in SERPs between February and March 2014. A second possible explanation for the abandonment of authorship is its influence on user search behavior. Results associated with an authorship tag generated three taiwan mobile database more clicks than "standard" results. We might also assume that this tag was competing with their AdWords advertising system in terms of visibility.
In 2011, this feature was created to allow authors to claim their content. The Mountain View giant concluded that it wasn't as valuable to its readers as it thought. In December 2013, Google reduced the size of author photos in search results before removing them entirely two months ago. These events were precursors to a planned death.
John Mueller, in his Google+ post, stated that the photos were removed because Google wanted to unify the user experience between desktop and mobile. Author photos didn't perform well on mobile (insufficient bandwidth and limited screen size).