In a nutshell, here’s what’s actually happening to Authorship. First—no, it isn’t completely gone; Authorship still exists. Secondly—yes, Google has made a major change to it, and yes, that means our Authorship pictures will be deleted over the next few days. And yes, that is quite a big deal.
What the $*&^, Google?
Really?! My profile image, linked to my Authorship from my G+ profile, is not going to appear in search results anymore?
It’s true. The announcement has been sourced from John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends analyst. John shared an official support.google.com link an official G+ status, just days ago on June 25.
What’s happened is that the Authorship picture, which normally looks like:
…is now completely gone from SERPs. So is the listed amount of Google circles in the search results. Authorship is still there, but in the form of just a light grey clickable name:
Google News results are slightly different. Author profile pictures will still appear in News, but their G+ count is gone.
Basically, Mueller said that Google’s efforts in deleting Authorship is to improve the visual appearance and design of their SERPs overall…especially on mobile. Ah, mobile improvement! A straw we can grasp at in the overall disheartening picture of bye-bye Authorship pictures. He also basically stated that click-through really won’t change by removing the Authorship picture in SERPs.
(That is directly against the human nature—John, really? Seeing that little image next to a search result definitely influenced viewers to click that link. SearchEngineLand agreed, stating the Author picture led to more visibility and clickthroughs.)
In the official Google Support page about the huge change to Authorship, Google again claims it is only “helping users discover great content.” It also lists how to get Authorship going.
The REAL Reason Why
Wordstream authors did some internal research and discovered that Authorship clickthrough rates were taking away significantly–and interfering with–Google Adwords clickthroughs. By removing Authorship pictures, Google came up with a tidy little solution to their Adwords distraction–just delete them.
Now, Google denies that clickthrough distraction was the answer, but our talented Rand from Moz called them out on their BS:
I am frustrated @JohnMu saying that it will not cost CTR. Either Google lied about the increase in CTR with photos, or they're lying now.
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 25, 2014
What Do We Do Now?!?
The important takeaway is that Authorship still exists and is very strong and very much alive still (the Google Support page itself helps you get Authorship going, if you haven’t already).
But, only credible, real authors are going to be able to acquire Authorship, going forward. This isn’t a new thing. Google reduced their Authorship results just last December to only show “more authoritative authors”. The drop in Authorship across the board was big, with a lot of stagnant author profiles no longer being featured with their image in SERPs.
Simply put, Authorship is going on a pedestal. It’s not within everyone’s reach anymore. You need to publish well-researched content on an ongoing basis; and you need to interact on a regular basis in social media (this includes your G+ profile), so Google regards you as an author credible enough to grant Authorship status to (which they’ve now minimized to just a linkable name). Publishing high quality content for your niche that gives you an authority voice is crucial.
Ann Smarty, Internet marketing expert, also says that:
- Authorship markups can now show up in results multiple times — instead of your headshot just showing up once, your author name will appear multiple times for multiple pages in one page of SERPs.
- Google will look at Authorship as one more foothold for credibility when determining how to rank you.
Helpful Resources
View Google’s Support page with the official details on the Authorship change. Need to get some ideas on how to publish quality content? One of our blogs this year addressed how content is setting the Google trends (and talks about how you can publish that type of content); and in this SiteProNews piece, we addressed how to focus on quality content in line with Google’s new updates.
