Google Authorship Killed: Google Plus Next?

Google announced today that Google Authorship will no longer impact search results. That means that if you have spent time building out your Google Plus profile in the hopes that it will move you and your content higher in search results, your efforts may have been in vain.

Now I'm stretching in a speculation that Google Plus might be next on the chopping block. What started out as a great way to build and nurture a community, that didn't limit you to 140 characters or constantly threaten your privacy by changing the rules (um, that would be Twitter and Facebook, respectively), was also a way that you also could improve how your content was found and ranked in the search results. Google+ with its ties to Google Authorship offered an opportunity to showcase your expertise and get found more readily in search.

Forbes contributor Steve Cooper explained some of the big reasons why you would want to build out a Google+ profile and the simple big reason? Google Authorship and its impact on search results were the reason. Now the rules have changed, per Google, so Steve wasn’t wrong – but you can see a pattern where people jumped in, me included, to make Google Plus a vibrant community and a viable marketing channel. Steve’s post is here: The One Reason Every Blogger Should Use Google+.

It took effort to do the Google Authorship thing, for the average guy or gal interested in helping their corporate profile. Google didn’t make it easy. All that effort just vanished.

In June 2014, Forbes contributor and SEO expert Jayson Demers, in his post: Google Authorship And Personal Branding: Why The Individual Beats The Corporate, gives many reasons why your personal brand can benefit from Google Authorship and Google+.  Days later, Google removed the Google+ profile photos from search results. Jayson published a follow-up a month later: Why Did Google Really Remove Authorship Photos? 7 Experts Weigh In. In it, he cites other top SEO experts like Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, and Mark Traphagen (who is one of my favorite Google+ and SEO guys), about how you still want to use Google Authorship. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has a solid post on how Authorship may give way to Author Rank by Google. It is worth reading if you want to understand this topic and its future.

This leaves me that Google+ is not a bad niche place to build a loyal community, but will it be next on the chopping block. There are plenty of marketing and savvy business owners who call Google+ a ghost town. A big part of its draw, its promise, was that Google+ was tied to Google Authorship, thereby improving your social rank in search results, if you were producing good content.

While I don’t have a huge following on Google (or anywhere for that matter), I did consider it a useful place to hang out from time to time and a place where certain content made sense. But I have to question if it is worth building anything else within the Google Empire ; as far as marketing a business and connecting with like-minded followers/viewers/readers. If you look at the simple “share this” type buttons – how often do you see big numbers for Twitter, Facebook, even LinkedIn, and a low count for Google Plus. Google+ may not die; it might not get killed by Google, but it may just wiggle around like a worm on hot concrete, waiting for its profile photo to disappear.

NOTE: I switch back and forth between Google+ and Google Plus because platform algorithms sometimes split the plus sign away from the word and ironically I want the search engines to find this post.