Google Doing Away with Authorship Pictures In Search Results

Google – Say it ain’t so!

The Google Authorship pictures that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in search results are about to go away. Google’s John Mueller detailed this change in an announcement on Google+:

We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results… 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.

Mueller also explains that removing authorship pictures from search results has not had a significant effect on click-through rates: “Our experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.”

Google is not doing away with authorship information all together though, the updated look will simply feature the author’s name in light grey.

What do you think about the new change being rolled out over the next few days? Have you spent a lot of time to get them setup, and what kind of metrics, good or bad, have you seen by implementing them?

Share your comments below!