Google Traffic Went From bad To Worse After Authorship Added

I have been trying to revamp one of my domains in the last few months to boost traffic, since it gets very little (rarely more than 100 visitors a day) and I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools that the Date Updated and Author code hatom code was missing on about 400 posts (it's a Wordpress based site using the Twenty Fourteen theme).

So I worked on making sure that both of these were added correctly, having also improved the format and SEO, removing Sitemaps for Category/Tag pages etc, and as of the past week I now have only 18 posts that show a problem with the hatom code.

Unfortunately, as soon as I added the code to verify the author, the traffic from Google dropped to almost nothing, so that even though most pages are included in Google, the ranking must be horrible.

My author details also do not show when I do a search on pages from this site, so do I assume that MY rating as an author has dragged my site down because I verified it?

I haven't been keeping all my sites up to date but I do have original content (to a large degree) but this site in particular I have been adding fresh content to for several months and this is original content.

 

1. Did you also verify your authorship via email? You can test this on the rich snippet testing tool from Google: http://www.google.nl/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

2. How many followers you have on Google+ and how many of your pages are liked via Google+?

The 2nd is where authorship ranking is all about.

 

That could be the problem, I haven't paid much attention to Google+ in the last year. I did when it began, but more recently I haven't had time to spend on there. Might be a good idea to allow time to get more traffic and popularity on there.