This isn’t going to be a instructive or educational post, just a pure rant from me about Google and how they get away with promising one thing and then doing the complete opposite.

There’s probably 20 things I could discuss here but the one that really got my eye was their decision to remove authorship and Google + circles from their SERPs. Most people have no doubt heard about this now and seen that pretty much 100% of author bios have been stripped from their search listings. Now, to go through this lets recap and see exactly what Google said originally about authorship and explain why so many marketers fell in love with what it could mean.

Launch of Google Authorship

This post on Moz by Mike Arnesen summed it up pretty well, but I will explain it briefly here anyway.

Google rolled out Google Plus back in and shortly after along came Google authorship and the ability for authors names and bio pics to appears in SERPs. Fantastic, what a great idea to encourage people to write more engaging content that Google can share to it’s users. People took this on quickly and then it exploded in popularity when it was discovered that having authorship in SERP results gave a huge CTR improvement. Who do you think showed this click through improvement? Google, yes Google actively promoted authorship showing that you could make you content more attractive to their users.

Then move on a couple of months after that and we start discussing the potential of Author rank. This was again promoted by Google as a way that will change Search and how they value content. It essentially meant that an author/writer could be creating compelling content on their own blog and effectively utilise that power wherever he/she writes on the web. That specific writer would have their own author rank that they would build up and this would allow Google to know that under certain topics they have an expertise and would be able to give that person possibly an advantage in their SERPS because their content is so good. This move would have been fantastic and is almost moving Google’s algorithm away from relying on links as a main trust source for sites. Something we all know that Google wants to do.

Why the Changes Now?

Now I know Google have only removed the author bio pics, they could still be using author rank in the background but this move essentially tells me that they are going back on everything they have said. Why would they remove these pics from the SERPs when they want to encourage people to implement authorship on their sites so they can utilise author rank as much as possible? Why would they do this when so many people love it and have been encouraged to write more because of it. Hell. As someone in an agency, I have pushed clients to implement this because of the benefits and what potential it could hold in the future. Now it seems all this is not going to happen.

A lot of Unanswered questions

Google has a lot of questions to answer now, you don’t just remove a huge product like this and say and quotes by John MuOur experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.”. Not when you have shown and promoted the complete opposite when launching authorship. I am quite comforted that there are a few people in the industry annoyed by this.

 

Kristie’s tweet is further proof showing the drop in impressions from authorship. The drop does look a bit insane so I’m hoping it is a bug. Let’s hope that’s not the real reflection of the drop in impressions.

I just don’t get it Google, I don’t like to think like this often but this almost looks like you have removed authorship because it got in the way of people clicking your ads. I used to think that Google was too big for the web spam team to collaborate with their PPC team to ensure their organic search quality was as profitable as possible. Now, I’m not so sure.

So, end of rant, I just want to end with I am a bit gutted that Google are going back on this, in case I hadn’t made it clear already. It was an incredible direction to head in and one that no other SE competitor had touched. Next time Google, please try sticking to your guns and see your ideas through, I really do think you’ve missed a good one here.