Google Drops Profile Photos, Google+ Circle Count From Authorship In Search Results

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:

Here is the old format, where normally having an image next to a search result would lead to more visibility and click-throughs:

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.

This new design for authorship in the search results is rolling out to both desktop and mobile results.