We’ve gotten a lot of questions lately about Google’s “authorship” feature lately, or lack thereof.

What was Google authorship?

You create a personal Google+ with your website, so when you published blogs, they would display your picture next to the description of the blog in search results. Because it personalized touch to blogs, the theory was that users would be more likely to click.

Only because of this increase in engagement clicks, did authorship become a way to boost rankings.

Why?

Google is engaged in a constant war on spam. Too many people were using authorship to game the system. They started writing spammy blog posts to try and increase their authorship. Spammy blog posts are nothing new, but using the authorship feature with them is. Over time, the authorship market became saturated and it was no longer a way to provide more relevant content.

Google has recently stated that it’s “simplifying” the design of their desktop search results pages. So this could be one reason why authorship is going away. Not only did it clutter up search results, but users were clicking on results further down results pages simply because they included a photo next to the post.

This means that someone could be writing a better post that was more relevant, and higher ranked, but not getting any clicks because they didn’t include an authorship photo. Google’s main focus is fair search results, and this definitely wasn’t a fair SEO practice.

What does this mean for you?

You can still blog! This change doesn’t present any barriers to small business blogging in anyway. But you will not still see your authorship photo next your blog post. This feature has been removed for good.