The last couple years saw the Google search results get a little friendlier when you were looking for something to read. They were displaying an author’s name and photo in their search results when articles came up. This wasn’t some Google magic, as authors or web masters had to build their article pages with all the proper tags and links to help Google make sense of who was writing this particular article. Google called this information “structured data”.
The idea was to put faces on search results, and improve click-through rates for authors who took the time to share their identity to Google’s user base. Google has since removed author images, as well as google+ circle counts, indefinitely. Google claims this has been done to clean up and simplify the search results page. Google also claims that author images were not increasing click-through rates based on their testing, although authors and bloggers claim the opposite. Google has not released any hard data verifying their claims.
For a blogger like me, it was a bit frustrated to see author images go. Getting it all to work nicely with WordPress was a bit frustrating when the markup was first introduced and now it all seems for nothing. I expect there will be some backlash on this decision, although the adoption for Google+ authorship has been low among big brands.
Update: Seems like authorship is now totally dead.
