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Google authorship feature deactivated (rather silently, half a year ago)

13 points by jgehrcke ↗ HN
Web content could be related/linked to a Google+ profile, with markup that became known as "rel=author markup". That was an important SEO feature offered by Google. You might be surprised -- like me -- that this feature is no more. The markup can be removed from your website:

http://gehrcke.de/2015/02/google-authorship-feature-deactivated/

TL;DR: the removal of the feature was communicated through Google+, half a year ago. I came across this accidentally today and figured that it's worth sharing, because clearly the ecosystem adjusted to the feature, and now requires active cleanup. The worthless/distracting remains will exist for years, probably.

5 comments

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marpstar
I noticed this back in January when working with a Jekyll theme I got from GitHub and was looking into how to set it up. I was also surprised, as you'd think that this is something that Google would want to allow. I actually kind of liked it, as post from familiar faces were easier to spot in the search results, but I can see how it could be distracting to people who couldn't care less who the author is.
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BorisMelnik
Yes this was pretty big news in the inbound marketing community. I was pretty shocked about this news as well, because it seemed to be moving in the dirction Google was going in, esp with their recent patents.