Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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. Google Authorship Support Dropped [plus.google.com]
Going forward, we're strongly committed to continuing and expanding our support of structured markup (such as schema.org). This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we'll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.
It’s also worth mentioning that Search users will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query — both in the main results, and on the right-hand side. Today’s authorship change doesn’t impact these social features.
Seems that mandatory aspect is what those characters in Google wanted.
If Google had wanted authorship to be "mandatory," authorship would have been a ranking factor--and a heavyweight ranking factor, at that.
That's laughable. Google will never be able to make anything mandatory, or even come close.
In fact it was another big defeat for them, and another victory for the rest of the web.
That's laughable. Google will never be able to make anything mandatory, or even come close. They couldn't even achieve the limited goals that they had for this author tag. In fact it was another big defeat for them, and another victory for the rest of the web.And the even funnier thing is that there will always be people ready to make excuses for Google's failures.
And the even funnier thing is that there will always be people ready to make excuses for Google's failures.
There's a difference between a failed experiment and a "big defeat" (aristotle's phrase). And experiments are just experiments: Some work, some don't. The important thing is to learn from them.The funny thing about the Search business is that people outside of the search engine side of things don't have much of a clue about what is going on. It is a black box to them. Throw in a few vaguely technical terms and anything will be believed.
[edited by: goodroi at 2:48 pm (utc) on Sep 4, 2014]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Please no url drops from new members [/edit]
When you are developing a product, failure is the last thing you want.
In the 1950's maybe. Internet companies, and Google is the poster child for this, have done amazing things by rapidly developing and releasing products and worrying about whether they'll be successful later.The dislike of failure is very much the Tesla mindset in operation. The Tesla mindset develops and builds a fully functional product. The "fail early, fail often" mindset is an inelegant process of throwing stuff at a wall to see if it will stick. However it is complicated by the market. The "fail early, fail often" company may appear to be doing better because it is "producing" so many products. While its failure rate is high, it has the odd success and people focus on that. The problem with Google is that it has become, like Microsoft, a derivative company. It is trying to copy the success of others, (Buzz/Google+ etc), and in many cases it fails. However in a few cases, it succeeds and generally drives most of the other players out of that market. In this too, Google resembles Microsoft.
This was not presented as a "test" as far as I can recall.
I hated the authority thing too, I still did it.
Authorship markup may have gone away, and author photos and bylines have disappeared from the SERPs, but that doesn't mean the "authority thing" is dead, any more than the demise of the PageRank "fuel gauge" as a meaningful tool means that PageRank is dead.
