Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Authorship Photos – Sayonara, It was nice to know you
In case you are living under an SEO rock or this is the only blog you are reading, John Mueller announced the end of author photos:
We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results, in particular creating a better mobile experience and a more consistent design across devices. As a part of this, we’re simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count. (Our experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.)
For more information on using authorship on pages of your website, check out: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986
This
Will become something like
© Copyright 2024 - MIKE BLUMENTHAL, ALL RIGHT RESERVED.
Comments
11 Comments
Does this mean the photo is no longer required to implement Authorship markup?
@Brian
It has never been required. But now there is less benefit. If you are asking if it is worthwhile I would give a great big maybe….if you are generating good content than it probably still makes sense.
This kinda sucks – I liked having my clients ‘stand out in the serps a bit 😉
You know, Mike, I was never a fan of these. I’m not shedding a tear over this change. I felt they were kind of messy, myself, but people who have taken pride of these probably won’t love this change. Hope you’re doing well!
Not so far up here in g.ca, Mike…all AS profile pix still coming up…
Wonder how far “behind” us Canucks are, eh?
@Jim
I still see them here as well but I fear that they are not long for this world
I still see them too, but time to wave bye bye. ;-(
That was quick. They should probably update this: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/
I have been experiencing missing Authorship photos over several, less trafficked pages on my site/blog for several months now and even at times appearing and disappearing photos. Maybe now it will finally be consistent and choose one or the other. I was always a fan of the the photos as I think people are more likely to click or even visit your profile, however Google’s data far outweighs my opinion.
@Ed
Google stopped showing some author photos last December and for some folks only showed byline. Now author photos are gone for all…. it appears that the result is an increase in ad rate click throughs… remember “it’s always whats best for the searcher”.
I miss them although I didn’t like my photo and always meant to change it. My clickthrough went down a bit.
Comments for this post are closed.