Tuesday, 8 July 2014

The Implications Of Google Removing Author Photos From Search

By Omar Rashad


Last week the SEO world was rocked when Google announced its plan to remove the author photos from search results. In the past adding authorship and the image in search results had proven to increase the number of clicks exponentially. The question remains, why did Google choose to implement this change that had only been in place a short while?



If you had an author pic associated with your Google links, then you had a distinct advantage. Having a picture associated with an article automatically conveys a certain sense of authority. Not only did this get you a boost in search ranks, but it also got you more clicks than people who didn't have author pics for their links.

Without these pics, marketers and developers may quickly find their hit counts going down. For people who rely on Adsense or other sorts of monetization, this could be devastating. So what do you do if you've lost your author pic in Google searches and know that it's adversely affecting you? You're going to have find other ways to focus your SEO efforts.

This whole thing demonstrates exactly how volatile the rules of Google are. Marketers have to always be on their toes if they want to get ahead in the search engine results, and this just throws another wrench into the works... kinda like how it did when Google originally introduced the pics to begin with a couple of years ago. It's not certain quite yet why Google is choosing to do this, but it ultimately doesn't matter. As people who rely on Google to bring us visitors and customers, we have to play by their rules or risk losing our entire business.

It remains to be seen what else changes in the coming weeks. This comes only a little bit after the announcement of a Google "Panda" SEO adjustment, including the exclusion of backlinks factoring into search ranks.

The recent announcement by Google regarding the end of author pictures in search results took the SEO world by storm. This seemingly insignificant feature was actually a gem for online marketers that could raise their CTR by up to 150%. The question on everyones mind has become why did google implement this sudden change, and where do we go from here.




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