Google announced on Friday that it will no longer display Authorship in its search results page.
"Authorship markup is no longer supported in Web search," Google wrote on its official support page for authorship.
Google Authorship, first launched in 2011, was established to aid writers in claiming or marking their own content. The feature helped content writers attract followers and entice them to visit their websites.
Authorship displays the writer's information for his or her page shown in search results. Another feature called Author Rank enables the user to filter the results based on the author's expertise and reputation.
But after monitoring Authorship's activity for three months, Google decided it was not significantly helpful for users. It really only caused distractions from more pertinent search results.
"We've gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we've tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information," wrote John Mueller, a trends analyst at Google Webmaster, in a Google+ post.
According to Tech Times, Google decided to remove the feature as part of its strategic plan to improve user experience in mobile and desktop devices. However, search users will still see the Google+ posts of their friends and relevant pages on the right-hand side of the page.
Mueller stated Google's experiments showed that removing the authorship feature would not affect traffic generated by websites shown on results pages. The search engine giant has taken down all author photos from the search results worldwide.
"If you're curious - in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users' experience," Mueller added.
