My Google Author Pic Disappeared
-
My Google author picture, which had been in place for a couple of years, disappeared from all SERP results recently. I checked, and rel=author attribution is valid on every post, as is the link to to the Google + authorship page (which contains a link back to the web site).
When I test URL's in the structured data testing tool the picture appears.
I'm out of troubleshooting ideas. Any suggestions welcome.
-
Hi Wayne,
You've received some solid responses. Were any of them helpful?
Christy
-
Yep there pulling authors with little G+ juice.
-
from what i hear google reduced the number of author pics shown to improve results. they only show some of the available pics. think it was a 15% decrease if i remember correctly.
-
I have noticed this problem over the past few days too. If I search in Chrome there are no author pics, but if I perform the same search in Firefox they appear. I'm not going to change anything, I don't think this is anything which requires a fix.
-
Unfortunately, sometimes we're at Google's discretion as to whether or not they want to display structured data and authorship the way that we would like them to.
Even if you have authorship set up properly, Google has no obligation to show your author image next to your content. When we set up Google authorship on our sites, we're merely suggesting to Google that we are the author of the content - it's up to them to display the image if they feel it's relevant. I've seen many SERPs where my authorship doesn't show up, but changing the keywords a bit will display the author image for the same posts.
I would give it a few days. Try using depersonalized search to see if it makes a difference. If your authorship image doesn't come back, I would unlink your site from your Google+ account, and relink it - and see if that brings it back.
-
Wayne,
The same thing happened to me for a while. I went back and went through the process of setting up authorship and soon afterwards, my picture re-appeared. In the past, I'd tried using a logo as my picture and that stopped working pretty quickly and when I changed back to my picture, it started working again. Here are some other comments regarding the loss of authorship photo topic from some well know players: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/04/12/authorship-brownouts-due-to-facerank/ . I think it boils down to eventually, the photo will probably come back by itself if it is a proper photo.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Crawling Issues! How Can I Get Google to Crawl My Website Regularly?
Hi Everyone! My website is not being crawled regularly by Google - there are weeks when it's regular but for the past month or so it does not get crawled for seven to eight days. There are some specific pages, that I want to get ranked but they of late are not being crawled AT ALL unless I use the 'Fetch As Google' tool! That's not normal, right? I have checked and re-checked the on-page metrics for these pages (and the website as a whole, backlinking is a regular and ongoing process as well! Sitemap is in place too! Resubmitted it once too! This issue is detrimental to website traffic and rankings! Would really appreciate insights from you guys! Thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | farhanm1 -
Web Page Dropped Out of Google?
One of our web pages seems to have completely dropped out of Google after featuring on page 1 for a number of years. It can't be a site wide issue as all other web pages are performing as normal. The page is http://www.contractormoney.com/income-protection/ and the key phrase it was performing well for was 'contractor income protection'. Any ideas??
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Google Blogger Intergration, any SEO benefit?
I want to use google blogger for my website blog, we want to intergrate it into the existing website (which is why wordpress isn't ideal as there is no php) if the domain was www.blog.mysite.com will www.mysite.com still recieve the seo bonuses of having a blog? or does it have to be www.mysite.com/blog otherwise i have little use for a blog, what i also want to ask is how does it intergrate? i don't want the blog on my site to be like a 'window' into the google blog site as that defeats the purpose, i need the content to actually be on my site to ensure the seo benefits. Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | DanBrayfield0 -
Google Links
I am assuming that the list presented by Google Webmaster tools (TRAFFIC | Links To Your Site) is the one that will actually be used by Google for indexing ? There seem to be quite a few links that there that should not be there. ie Assumed NOFOLLOW links. Am I working under an incorrect assumption that all links in webmaster tools are actually followed ?
Technical SEO | | blinkybill0 -
Google Analytics
I usually have Google analytics "real-time" running on one of my monitors, occasionally I glance at the screen to see that are TOP KEYWORDS people are using, lately there have been a lot of long-tail keywords. If I try to copy and paste the queries into google, i can never seem to find us organically for the long-tail searches? Is the real-time feature accurate? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Want to Target Mobile site for Google Mobile Version and Desktop Site for Google Desktop Version
I have ecommerce site with both mobile version and desktop version. Mobile version starts with m.example.com and full version starts with www.example.com I am using same content through out both site and using 301 redirection by detecting user agent vice-versa. My both sites are accessible to crawl by any google spider. I have submitted both sites's sitemap to GWT and mobile site having mobile sitemap xml, so google can easily recognize my mobile site. Is it going to help to rank my both sites as per my expectation? I need to rank for mobile site in Google mobile and ranking for desktop site in Google desktop version. Some of pages of my mobile site are started to appearing in Google desktop version. So how I can stop them to appear in Google desktop? Your comments are highly welcome.
Technical SEO | | Hexpress0 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0 -
Google dropping pages from SERPS
The website for my London based plumbing company has thousands of specifically tailored pages for the various services we provide to all the areas in London. It equates to approximately 6000 pages in total. When google has all these pages indexed, we tend to get a fair bit of traffic - as they cater pretty well for long tail searches. However, every once in a while Google will drop the vast majority of our indexed pages from SERPs for a few days or weeks at a time - for example at the moment Google is only indexing 613 whereas last week it was back at the normal ~6000. Why does this happen? We of course lose a lot of organic traffic when these pages don't displayed - what are we doing wrong? Website: www.pgs-plumbers.co.uk
Technical SEO | | guy_andrews0