Disappearing Authorship Pictures

[waynekolenchuk]

I have a couple of established sites where the Authorship picture has suddenly disappeared and been gone for about a week now. Everything looks OK when I check, and the rich snippet tool displays the pictures when I check using that.

I'm interested to see if anyone else is experiencing a similar issue.

[dotfly]

can confirm this issue... its the same with me... I think Google is testing (again) something new... maybe theve changed some criterias for those pictures?

[waynekolenchuk]

Interesting. I did change the pictures — good quality head shots on cropped white background. After this they (briefly) reappeared, and then disappeared again.

[CustomButtonCo.com]

Are these real people?  G+ has a facial recognition and will remove stock photos etc.

[FedeEinhorn]

Google announced about a month ago that they were going to remove some rich snippets from SERPs and they were going to start showing them only for the most trusted authors. This might be the result of that exact update.

To get the picture back you only need to keep building and creating content while you continue establishing your online reputation.

More info: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippet-reduction-17579.html

[waynekolenchuk]

Yes, real people.

[waynekolenchuk]

If that's the case I'm wondering what the criteria must be, as these aren't spam sites.

[FedeEinhorn]

They almost never tell the "why" and "how", because spammers will eventually find a way to overcome it. Cutts at pubcon simply said something like "the roll out of Google authorship opened the door to anyone that can implement a Google author tag.  In the coming months Google will finish up a plan to look at social factors around google authorship and award higher priority to author’s that are truly authoritative on a topic and that have published social conversations on that topic."

watch?v=K7JhnWHbwnE

[waynekolenchuk]

Thanks Federico, I think this is pointing in the right direction. Both sites are very technical and as such barely have a social presence. I think it's time for another look at Google +.

[TheeDigital]

You say these arn't spam sites, my only concern would be how active the Authors are on Google+.

As Fedrico said, Google is looking at these profiles to be active so it's important that these profiles stay active and engaged with other G+ members.

[waynekolenchuk]

This may be an issue. Because these are extremely technical sites I have never done anything with Google+ but it might be time to revisit that.