News hot of the press regarding Google Authorship . Google is removing the profile photo and circle count from its listings. This was announced yesterday in Google + by John Mueller .
This move it to apparently to simplify the Google authorship listings across different devices – mobile and desktop searches. Google has been testing this and it says that “Our experiments indicate that click-through behaviour on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.” Really? I would not have expected that.
Currently Google is still showing the profile photo and circle count on a lot of listings but expect your to disappear soon.
I am not sure I like this idea as it was a huge benefit for users to be able to immediately identify content provided by their trusted sources in the SERP’s.
So how do you feel about this change? Good, bad, don’t care???
(I am off to flag this to my SEO students – we were only talking about authorship yesterday and this morning and already my lecture notes are out of date :-). Better update them.)