Steven Wyer: Authorship Joins Google Graveyard
It’s official, says Steven Wyer. Google Authorship has succumbed to the same fate as Google Health, Google Dictionary, and Google Page Creator–all failed attempts to improve user experiences. Here, Steven Wyer answers questions about what, if anything, this change means to content creators.
Q: What is Google Authorship?
Steven Wyer: Google Authorship was a webmaster tool developed by Google that allowed for a digital watermark of sorts.
Q: What did it do?
Steven Wyer: In theory, it helped authors link their writings and signify their page as originating content, boosting their authority on a given topic.
Q: How long did Google offer Authorship?
Steven Wyer: It was a three year test, and one that had an uncertain fate from the beginning.
Q: Did Google Authorship connect to a person’s Google+ account?
Steven Wyer: Google did try adding that capability, but even that did not convince users to adopt the tool.
Q: What factors led to the discontinuation of Authorship?
Steven Wyer: It never really took off; it’s estimated that only about 30% of site owners used Authorship. It actually started as a factor in Google’s AgentRank, which is similar to page ranking but gives strength to an author instead of a specific page.
Q: Why end the program now? Why not attempt to make improvements?
Steven Wyer: Many site owners considered the author markup too complex to implement. Even experienced webmasters were often left confused and with incorrectly marked pages.
Q: Would it have been possible for Google to automatically accredit a piece to a specific author?
Steven Wyer: Google did attempt that for a while, but it led to several hilariously failed attributions. The most famous of these was a New York Times editorial linked to Truman Capote – nearly 30 years after the novelist’s death.
Q: How did that happen?
Steven Wyer: The Times contributor who wrote the piece, Emily Bazelton, did not have an active Google+ account; Capote did, albeit more of a posthumous tribute than an actual profile. Bazelton mentioned Capote in her byline and Google grabbed that, skipping right over her name.
Q: Did Authorship have any value to searchers?
Steven Wyer: Perhaps, but very low. Evidence suggested that clicks were not truly affected by the author tags.
Q: Was Authorship implemented by publishers on behalf of the writer?
Steven Wyer: Not really. A report by Stone Temple Consulting looked at 150 publishers, only 50 had even made an attempt to attribute writings via Google Authorship.
Q: Do you think Authorship will make a return?
Steven Wyer: It’s doubtful, since Google seems to have killed it completely.
Q: But didn’t they suspend the service before?
Steven Wyer: They had plans to do that and made public statements that it might be used again later; no such notation this time.
Q: Google seems to test and ditch services all the time. Why is that?
Steven Wyer: I think they are constantly trying to make the search process easier and more valuable to users…
Q: How do they measure value?
Steven Wyer: It comes down to search results relevance and what users then do with those results.
Q: For example?
Steven Wyer: Google has shifted the last few years to really focus on mobile search results. Mobile users now account for a vast majority of Google searches. These users’ results must be delivered swiftly and accurately – or Google is no more useful than an old, outdated phone book.
Q: What effect will this change have on content owners?
Steven Wyer: It likely won’t have any major effect. Google still has the power to know where a work originated so any duplicate copies will continue to be pushed further down in search results.
