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How will Google's removal of author photos from search results affect user behavior?

  • On 28 June 2014 Google removed the author photos from web search results, leaving just a clickable link to the author's name. How will this affect the way users behave? Will the web pages that used to have author photos in search links see a decline in traffic? Report about the change: http://searchengineland.com/google-plays-authorship-search-results-dropping-profile-image-google-circle-count-195163

  • Answer:

    The removal of author images from SERP links of pages with Authorship markup would definitely lower the CTRs of these links. The presence of images drove more users to click on the links due to the trust factor associated with the image of an author as opposed to an article from a faceless author. As per some independent studies, the author images significantly improved (upto 150%)  the visibility of these links on the SERP, leading to improved traffic. With the removal of images, a link with authorship markup implemented would look almost similar to a non-marked-up page except for the name of the author which can be easily missed. This would reduce the CTRs of such links and de-value the importance of authorship markup, leading to a number of SEOs re-considering its value as an important SEO technique. This was a very surprising move by Google, considering its inclination towards ranking trustworthy, authored content.

Abhilash Menon at Quora Visit the source

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I'm not an expert or anything, this is just my 2 cents. I think while it may not lead to a sharp decline in views, for some reason I found that having a face next to a link leads to more credibility (psychologically) and resulted in a click through. So I guess for websites who used to have the advantage of a picture next to their link have just lost it. That's all.

Suhith Rajesh

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