Google recently announced that going forward it will not display Google Authorship references in its search results. In other words, Google has removed the link to the Google+ profile of the authors in its search results.

Google Authorship feature was launched in 2011 and was projected to allow authors to claim their content as well as attain more followers by displaying the author’s work in search results. This feature was undertaken to help users clean out information which is not useful simply by counting the status of the author for providing trustworthy information.

Google’s Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller announced that “Google has made the difficult decision to stop showing Authorship in search results” after about three years of experimentation. Further he explained that “it has been observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped for and can even distract from those results.”

Also Mueller added that removing Authorship information will not affect the query and people will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query. Although, it was quite clear that Authorship didn’t affect the traffic hence going forward you will not see any decrease in traffic.

Along with Google authorship removal announcement Mueller clearly  said that Google will still put emphasis on Schema.org structured markup : “This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.”

What do you think about this move of Google on removing Authorship information in search results?

Is it for good or bad? Please comment.