Thanks to these new features, Google+ saw a big increase in its user count. Especially, the Google Search Authorship was one of the main features that lured thousands of bloggers to sign up for the service, to get their name and profile photo appear alongside related search results. This actually turned the service into Google’s identity platform and helped authors boost their content to rank well among search results. Sadly, all of a sudden, Google has decided to immediately get rid of its Authorship service, for good.
Now you won’t be seeing your name and the link to your Google+ profile alongside your website search results anymore. Google says that removing Authorship does not reduce traffic to sites and the decision was made solely to improve users’ experience.
“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. 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,” John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools announced in a Google+ post.
Google showed their disinterest in this feature back in last year when they started to remove author photo snippets from search results in December 2013, and finally got rid of all the photo snippets in June 2014. Google claimed it helped with saving mobile bandwidth and fit well with limited screen space. After this revamp, only the author name and a byline appeared alongside the results. However, now even that part is gone from search results.
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As a blogger, I loved this feature and it encouraged me share a lot of my articles on Google+. I kept my G+ profile at a professional level just for this feature. But now, with the feature gone, my interest in Google+ lowered down to just sharing funny GIF’s and meme’s.
Would this actually make bloggers use Google+ even less than before? Share your thoughts in the comments.
[ Photo - Robert Scoble]
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Follow @nrjperera – Roshan Jerad Perera