Last week, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller announced that they would be dropping the profile photo and circle count from the listings on the search engine results page where authorship is assigned. See below how the page previously looked when authorship was set up.
See below how a search result now appears when the aforementioned change by Google has been implemented. Note how the author name still appears and is clickable but the profile picture and circle number no longer appear.
The reasons given for this change of strategy by Google were briefly explained in Mueller’s announcement from June 25th.
“We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results, in particular creating a better mobile experience and a more consistent design across devices… Our experiments indicate that click-through behaviour on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.”
