CTR of established authors to fall with demise of Authorship.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BANGALORE: In a not-so-favourable move for established authors and publishing houses, Google scrapped its Authorship feature, which means that authors and bloggers will no longer see names linked to their Google Plus profile in the search results page.
Google inducted the Authorship feature in their rich snippet category, as an experiment, three years back and had been constantly keeping an eye on user’s interaction with it. This June, the tech giants had stopped showing images of authors from the Google Plus in the search results page and restricted it just to their names. John Mueller, the Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google said images didn’t make much of an impact to the Click Through Rate (CTR).
The new move from Google comes as a shot in the arms of many SEO strategists who created Google+ profiles just for making use of the Authorship feature. Now doing this will have little to no effect on the search results even though it is yet to confirm whether the credibility of the authors in Google will continue being one of the ranking features.
Google had earlier stated authorship as one of the key ranking factors for search results, but the new move could be hinting at the possibility of it moving towards taking the drastic step of pulling the plug on Google+.
The Google+ post of John Muller that appeared on Friday reads, “I’ve been involved since we first started testing authorship markup and displaying it in search results. 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.”
According to Pradeep Kumar, CEO of Stan Ventures, an Indo-American SEO Reseller Agency, “this decision to scrap authorship will have severe impact on the CTR of news publications, especially the traffic to columns and other contributory articles. Till now, the name of the author who the readers already knew added to their interest to click on the article. But with this feature removed, readers will have no clue about the authenticity of the article and might end up reading a low-quality one.”
Even though he says websites will not be affected by this move, many established authors who have fan followers across the world will be affected as their loyal readers will no longer be able to read archives stories, which was one of the highlighted features of Google Authorship.
Contradictory to what studies have found about Authorship, Google’s version says that authorship in the search result was more of a distraction for users rather than a useful feature.
So, after a three-year-old experiment, Google had pronounced the verdict to kill Authorship. Now, with authorship dead it will take a bit of time to realize whether this might affect the click through rates of websites.
1 Comment
The expression “shot in the arm” doesn’t mean what you apparently think it does. And how do you make the leap from Google the search engine removing authorship to your assumption that they will kill Google+?