"The End of Google Authorship"

MELBOURNE, Australia - Dec. 8, 2014 - PRLog -- Jo Macdermott, Owner and Senior Marketing Consultant from Next Marketing shares her insights into the shut down of Google Authorship.

Earlier this year, Google announced it ended its Authorship program. Some are worried that their time in growing their Google Plus profile pages has been wasted.

“Don’t worry, if you’ve built up your Google Plus profile, your efforts may not have been in vain.” Macdermott says.

“Online marketing (http://www.flyingsolo.com.au/marketing/online-marketing) is one of the easiest, arguably affordable ways to grow your business; and Google Authorship was a great tool for anyone who wanted to increase their online visibility and website traffic.” Says Macdermott.

Google Authorship linked your Google + profile (http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/getstarted/guide.html) content and anything else wrote online to Google search results. With Google paying more attention to individual authors and quality content, Google Authorship was a means of verifying your identity and becoming directly affiliated with whatever content you created.

When asked about the benefits of Google Authorship Macdermott said

“You may have seen the head shots next to the Google listings for writers who have Google Authorship. Some writers have argued that a head shot image was one of the biggest benefits of Authorship. The idea was to influence search rankings based on the reputation of its authors by using digital signatures.”

“ Rich Snippets is the next thing to focus on to improve your search rankings. ”

John Mueller from Google’s Webmaster tools announced in a Google+ post (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8) that the primary reason behind the Authorship removal was a response to continuous amounts of Google’s testing, where they evaluated that Authorship was not meeting Google’s two goals: Low adoption rate by authors and webmasters and low value to searchers

Mueller explained that in their tests, removing Authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites, so it will not have a negative impact on search results in the short term.

The previous Google Authorship URL now directs users to a page on ‘rich snippets (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170)’ as a way to improve search results.

What are rich snippets?

“Snippets are the few lines of text that appear under every search result and are designed to inform the user about what the landing page contains and why it is relevant. It’s detailed information intended to improve the search result listing. These could be in the form of: an average price range for a restaurant, preparation time for a recipe, reviews of a local business or a snippet for a music album.” Macdermott said.

Google is indicating that optimising these search result listings with ‘rich snippets’ is the replacement of Authorship, or the next thing to focus your time and energy on.

“However, I don’t think that Authorship will be gone forever, the concept was solid and I believe that Google will continue to expand until a trusted method is developed.” Macdermott said.

For more information contact

Jo Macdermott

Next Marketing

http://www.nextmarketing.com.au/

jo.macdermott@nextmarketing.com.au

03 8060 8544