Google: Authorship Bug Affects “Very Few Sites,” Actively Working On A Fix

Google has confirmed that there are current issues with displaying authorship rich snippets on “very few sites.” A Google spokesperson told us “it’s something we’re actively working on” but that “it affects very few sites” on the Internet. This is a topic I’ve personally been tracking very closely, as my own site is impacted by […]

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authorship-adoptionGoogle has confirmed that there are current issues with displaying authorship rich snippets on “very few sites.” A Google spokesperson told us “it’s something we’re actively working on” but that “it affects very few sites” on the Internet.

This is a topic I’ve personally been tracking very closely, as my own site is impacted by this very limited bug. About a month ago, I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that my own face is not showing up in the search results for that site and there are dozens of other complaints from webmasters. This has been going on for months.

Sites that had authorship rich snippets displaying in the Google search results since its inception, suddenly noticed Google has dropped their faces from the search results.

Yesterday, a major car information site on the internet, emailed us about the issue. They wrote to us that they have been having this issue since “early January,” like many of the other reports. They also told us that a Google representative told them directly that nothing is wrong on their side. This is the quote they sent us – although Google has not confirmed if it was authentic:

I’ve discussed with the team working on this and it doesn’t look like there is anything that can be done from your end at this point to expedite the process. Rest assured the team is aware of your request and is doing everything possible internally to make this work as quickly as seamlessly as possible, we try to support as many different site designs as possible, but we still have issues that are being worked out.

Thanks for your continued patience, I will send another update as soon as I have one.

I did ask John Mueller of Google about this back in early June, you can see my question to him about one minute and fifty seconds into the video below. He basically said my code was fine and that it was algorithm related.

This issue has impacted the click-through rate of established and respected sites, such as that car site and my own, for about 6 months now. Google has said it is impacting “very few sites” but that they are “actively working on” a fix. Google however has not given us an estimate time for the fix to be rolled out.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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