Google Drops Profile Photos, Google+ Circle Count From Authorship In Search Results

Google’s John Mueller has announced that Google is making a major change in the search results around authorship. Specifically, Google is dropping the profile photo and circle count from the search listings where authorship is assigned to a web page.

Mueller said that the “click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.” For some reason, I highly doubt that, but webmasters can be the judge of that as this gets rolled out.

Here is the new design for authorship. Notice that all you see is a clickable author name:

Here is the old format, where normally having an image next to a search result would lead to more visibility and click-throughs:

Note that authorship has also been updated in the Google News results. They contain a smaller profile image, but the Google+ circle count has been dropped from there as well.

This new design for authorship in the search results is rolling out to both desktop and mobile results.

For more on how to implement authorship, see this help document and for more stories on Google Authorship click here.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz 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's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.