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:
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Here is the old format, where normally having an image next to a search result would lead to more visibility and click-throughs:
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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.
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This new design for authorship in the search results is rolling out to both desktop and mobile results.
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