Google Authorship Goes Down Again, Twice In One Week

Google Authorship is once again down for the count, second time within a one-week period. Authorship is the image you see next to the Google results of those who wrote the article, blog post or news story. Normally, Google’s search results are sprinkled with them, but now, no search results are showing the authorship rich […]

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Google Authorship is once again down for the count, second time within a one-week period. Authorship is the image you see next to the Google results of those who wrote the article, blog post or news story. Normally, Google’s search results are sprinkled with them, but now, no search results are showing the authorship rich snippet.

Here is what authorship should look like next to a snippet:

google-authorship-yes-image-1400675709

Here is what it looks like when Google takes it away.

google-authorship-no-image-1400675709

Last week, Thursday at 3:45 p.m. EST, authorship dropped out of the search results. Google fixed the issue within two hours.

Now, authorship dropped out of the Google search results at about 2 p.m. EST and over two hours later, the author images are still not there.

We have to assume this is a bug and not something intentional. We will reach out to Google for a comment.

Update: Authorship has returned to Google’s search results at around 5:20pm EST, so this was an outage of over 3 hours.


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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