If you’ve been following the news, you know that last October Matt Cutts announced at Pubcon to expect a 15% reduction in the amount of rich snippets and authorship results.
The anticipated move was seen as an attempt by Google to display more authoritative results. Some SEOs speculated that this is a step in the direction of “author rank” where Google strives to return results from authors it considers as authoritative on certain subject matters.
Yesterday, Mozcast spiked to 98 degrees, one of the highest days of flux we’ve seen in Google’s search results in recent memory. Other Google weather stations such as Algoroo reported a similar spike.
A few webmasters have speculated this update included a reduction in authorship photos. While the data is still early, the new MozCast SERP Feature Graph does indeed show nearly a 15% decline in results that display authorship photos over the past 30 days.
What about specific results?
A couple of months ago, I took a screenshot of a Google result that returned 10 out of 10 authorship photos. The query was “10 SEO copywriting tips.”
Two months ago that search returned 10 authorship photos. Today the same query returns only 7 for me, a 30% reduction.
Here are the 2 results, side by side:
It will be interesting to see if this is simply a reduction in rich snippets and authorship photos, or if this is actually an effort on Google’s part to display more authoritative results.
How about you – have you noticed a change in authorship photos?