The Google Authorship program has been a big talking point for marketers and content producers for several years. Top content producers would get their Google+ profile picture, as well as information about their ‘circles’ displayed in the search results with their articles. In addition, in some cases the search results would show other articles they had written on similar subjects as the one being searched for.
Overall this pushed many people into the Google+ network, since it was shown to increase click-through rates by as much as 150% in some cases.
According to a recent post by Google’s Lead Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, the pictures of the authors will be removed from the Google search results. Other information will remain in place, but at this point it is unclear as to whether or not that will be eliminated in the future as well.
Google claims that the move is to help keep the look of their search results clean and streamlined, as well as to help keep desktop and mobile search results looking the same.
Of course, many people will see this as just one more sign that Google+ is being allowed to die out over time. As fewer features are kept up with the social network, there will be less reason for anyone to continue to visit the site. Naturally, Google denies this type of thing, but in this case, their actions may be speaking louder than their words.
What exactly this will mean for authors is not really known yet. For the most part, they will need to continue to publish high quality content and hope to build a following over time, just like they always have.
