Google Refines Authorship Removes Photos & Circles

If your websites search results lost it’s Google authorship profile photo and circles here’s why

According to this Google Plus post by John Mueller “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.)”

I know a lot of us worked real hard to get our sites into compliance. Kind of suxs in a way that Google is still experimenting with authorship, and we are eager lab rats jumping in and saying take my website please.

And this post which is seemingly properly titled: Is Google Authorship Dead? Strikes the nail dead center on it’s head. First my thumbnail image disappeared from search results. Now the number of circles has been removed too. Wonder what’s next??

In my opinion, the whole idea of using authorship was to make our search results stand out from the rest. The thumbnail image was a quick way to recognize that an article was written by an individual. As is is now authorship enhanced search results blend in with the rest.

And it has been said that authorship does not effect serps and page rank. With that in mind i don’t see any benefit to using authorship markup as it is now.  Oh well such is life i guess.

What are your thoughts about this?