Google Authorship Statistics Have Been Removed

I am not sure if this is something that has been done on purpose or not, but Google has removed the Google Authorship stats that were previously available in Google Webmaster Tools.

The page, which was previously located here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/labs-author-stats-1 is now showing a 404 error:

I’m not sure if this is just something that is temporary, or if this is part of a larger plan for Google to eventually remove Google Authorship altogether. As you might recall, Google has removed Google Authorship photos from the search results entirely because they apparently were causing less clicks on Google AdWords ads.

Several others have noticed that the Google Authorship statistics have been removed, there’s someone talking about it here and here on the Google product forums.

What’s interesting, though, is that the page is still in Google. Wouldn’t the page be removed in the Google SERPs if the page was removed? Or is it just taking a long time for it to be removed from the search results?

Whatever the case, a H/T goes out to Kristine for pointing this out to me.

@Google Authorship reporting has been removed from my account. Anyone else? Anyone have info? #seo #google

— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) August 4, 2014