In a recent blog post, Google has announced that it is removing Google Authorship from the search engine results. However search results will still include posts from Google+ and its relevant pages. So, removal of authorship means that webmasters can remove all rel=author markup that is present on their website.

First launched in June 2011, Google currently feels that information about the author is not useful to its users and even lowers the overall user experience. Google’s official Authorship in web-search support page merely states “Authorship markup is no longer supported in web search.”

John Mueller wrote on his Google + page that “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. Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.”

He further also added that, ”It’s also worth mentioning that Search users will still see Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query — both in the main results, and on the right-hand side. Today’s authorship change doesn’t impact these social features.

So while the idea behind Google Authorship was valid as it provided authenticity to the content, there is still a hope that Google will soon implement better measures to ensure only good and relevant content reaches the users at all times.