

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

Web content could be related&#x2F;linked to a Google+ profile, with markup that became known as &quot;rel=author markup&quot;. 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:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gehrcke.de&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;google-authorship-feature-deactivated&#x2F;<p>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&#x27;s worth sharing, because clearly the ecosystem adjusted to the feature, and now requires active cleanup. The worthless&#x2F;distracting remains will exist for years, probably.
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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.

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bibinou
previous discussion :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8240288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8240288)

