Google ends authorship experiment in search results
NEW DELHI: Google has announced that it has decided to stop showing authors' names when their articles appear in search results. The authorship experiment started in 2011, aimed at providing more valuable and relevant results in Google searches.
However, a Google+ post by John Meuller of Google Webmaster Tools says that the experiment did not have the desired effect. Google had hoped that search results showing the names and photos of authors will make users click on the link more, but Meuller says "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."
Meuller said that the end of authorship "does not seem to reduce traffic to sites." It also does not affect the number of clicks on advertisements.
This is the latest in a series of steps that Google has taken to scale back the authorship initiative. In December 2013, Google had curtailed the number of author photos it displayed for each result. Then in June 2014, it stopped showing photos altogether. The reason to stop showing the photos was the limited screen space and bandwidth on mobile devices, Meuller had said at the time.
Despite the end of authorship, users who are logged while searching queries will still see relevant Google+ results from friends and pages they follow.
NEW DELHI: Google has announced that it has decided to stop showing authors' names when their articles appear in search results. The authorship experiment started in 2011, aimed at providing more valuable and relevant results in Google searches.
However, a Google+ post by John Meuller of Google Webmaster Tools says that the experiment did not have the desired effect. Google had hoped that search results showing the names and photos of authors will make users click on the link more, but Meuller says "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."
Meuller said that the end of authorship "does not seem to reduce traffic to sites." It also does not affect the number of clicks on advertisements.
This is the latest in a series of steps that Google has taken to scale back the authorship initiative. In December 2013, Google had curtailed the number of author photos it displayed for each result. Then in June 2014, it stopped showing photos altogether. The reason to stop showing the photos was the limited screen space and bandwidth on mobile devices, Meuller had said at the time.
Despite the end of authorship, users who are logged while searching queries will still see relevant Google+ results from friends and pages they follow.
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