In a post on G+ yesterday Google’s John Mueller announced the removal of authorship avatars and circle counts from Google’s search results. The reason behind it is to improve the visual display of search results and maintaining a more “consistent design across devices”.
Now granted John did mention that Google’s own experiments have shown the click-through behavior for the new design to be similar to the previous one – and plenty of studies and previous Google’s claims have shown this to not be the case – we will have to see what actually comes from this. For now search results with authorship images will slowly fade away.
This has stirred quiet the discussion across the webmaster community with plenty of webmasters being utterly infuriated by Google’s decision and considering completely dropping authorship from their websites markup. What are you’re thoughts?