Rel=author dead, rel=publisher not

[Margaret Ornsby]

Official word from Google
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8

In short -
the rel=author has been a failure and is now no longer supported in its originally intended function. We've seen the photos slowly dying, so this should come as no surprise.

Key points:

"

• 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.
  
• we're no longer processing this data -- it's not just a UI change
  
• it'll be removed from the Structured Data Testing Tool too
• publisher markup is not affected by this
  

"

Barry Schwartz will be doing a write up about this tomorrow, seems he has even more to add to the announcement.

---------- Post Merged at 10:01 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 09:51 AM ----------

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6083347?hl=en - short and sweet version

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Margaret, thanks for sharing!

I was just reading the posts at Search Engine Land and Marketing Land.
Barry posted at the latter. Here they are:

<a href="http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975">It's Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results</a>

<a href="http://marketingland.com/google-officially-dropped-authorship-98066">Official: Google Ends Authorship For Search Results</a>

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

After a little more reading around the place: https://schema.org/author

---------- Post Merged at 10:08 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 10:07 AM ----------

Oops - sorry linda, didn't see your post until after I posted my update

 

[Linda Buquet]

Oh no I had not posted about it yet, so no worries. I was just starting to read when you posted so just added a couple links.

 

[djbaxter]

Why am I not surprised? I am reminded of how nofollow was supposed to reduce spam and then got perverted by Google because of problems with PageRank manipulation.

Sometimes it all gets so tiresome.

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

They are totally committed to throwing anything out if it fails testing. No sacred cows.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Figured it was only a matter of time before this happened. Once they started reducing authorship images to showing only 15% (someone can fact check the correct percentage if they want) of the time, I think we all pretty much knew it was a death sentence for authorship.

I'm not worried about this change. Sure it's a bummer for some, but it got really abused by everyone. Plus Google wants to make sure users are looking at their ads, not at the organic results