Has Google stopped rendering author snippets on SERP pages if the author's G+ page is not actively updated?
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Working with a site that has multiple authors and author microformat enabled. The image is rendering for some authors on SERP page and not for others. Difference seems to be having an updated G+ page and not having a constantly updating G+ page. any thoughts?
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This makes some sense. It's always helpful to be active online and search engines seem to prefer pages that are active and have up to date content. I found this out by accident years ago just updating my website constantly, not for SEO purposes, but because I like to keep my website current. All the time, it's been helping my rankings and I didn't even know it.
You should suggest to your various authors (if they are different people) that they post updates, as minor an update as it may seem, it is still a content change / addition / update. That's what matters, along with driving visitors to your Google+ page via Facebook, Twitter, various social network websites and email blasts. I have all my websites including social networking, linking to each other.
So, regardless if it's true or not, it's a good idea to keep Google+ pages update frequently, because if it's not true now, it maybe later on, and you want to be ahead of the game.

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Totally agree Dan. As of last week all the previous author microformats that worked suddenly disappeared from the SERP pages after working from their implementation