Authorship Is Dead; Long Live Authorship

Google's authorship program may be over, but columnist Eric Enge notes it's still important to work on building authority.

 I will explain why you should still be actively cultivating that authority and discuss the benefits you can get from it.

Why Did Google Kill Support For Rel=Author?

At Stone Temple Consulting, we did a detailed study showing the lack of adoption of authorship tagging by both authors and publishers. The short story is that the adoption rate was abysmally low:

If Google was hoping for mass scale implementation of rel=author tags all over the web, it did not come even close to happening. Not only did the great majority of authors and sites not participate, but even among those who tried to implement the tags, a significant percentage did so incorrectly.
As a consequence, the scope of the impact of the authorship tags ended up being quite limited. This is important, as Google had to implement special algorithms to support scanning for these tags and implementing special search features, such as author photos. The benefit they were getting from the program was not enough to cover the expense of supporting it.
But is that all there was to it? Or did Google use the three years of authorship tagging data to help tune its own algorithms for recognizing and tracking authors? Then, once those algos were tuned, they simply shut the feature off?
To explain that in more detail, Google could have used authorship tagging as a way to train algorithms for identifying authors. This could work by running two algos in parallel: one that read the rel=author tagging, and a second that tried to identify the authors without use of the tagging. Then they could compare the results of the two algorithms and use the rel=author based one to tune the other.
My guess is that this is not what happened, for the following reason: If Google really wanted to train such an algorithm, it would not be a difficult project for them to go through and manually identify thousands of authors and then use that data to test and train their algo to better recognize authors automatically. This would save them from having to launch a public program around Authorship, and it would provide more accurate info than relying on third parties to implement rel=author correctly.
Bottom line for me on this “debate” is that I think that Google wanted author tagging to work, and thought it would benefit users, but it did not succeed on either score.
Read more Click here / www.advante360.com