An Analysis Of Googles Removal Of Author Photos From Search Results Matters

Posted by Hadraj Youssef On Friday, July 11, 2014 0 Comments
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?



There are many speculations about this sudden change and the reasoning behind it. One school of thought believes that the change might be centered around user experience, and ties in with the search engines new 'mobile first' management strategy. The idea is that, eventually, mobile users will surpass desktop users making it the most important market. Because of this, Google is aiming to unify the site into a single site that is mobile and desktop friendly.

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.

Another school of thought suggests that the internet giant has implemented the change solely for the purpose of removing the unfair advantage an image gives search results over their ads. In recent years PPC ads have taken over much of the prime space in Google search, and if they aren't being clicked on then the bottom line will be affecte.

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 official reason given me the internet giant was that the change was simply due to their new policy dubbed 'Mobile First'. The vision behind this new thought process comes from the belief that mobile users will surpass desktop users this year, and the companies aim is to create one unified site that caters to all platforms. That, coupled with a recent study that showed users preferred no images in their searches was the stated reason.




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