My Google Author Pic Disappeared

[waynekolenchuk]

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.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Wayne,

You've received some solid responses. Were any of them helpful?

Christy

[CustomButtonCo.com]

Yep there pulling authors with little G+ juice.

[mark_baird]

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.

[edwardlewis]

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.

[brad.s.knutson]

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.

[Chris.Menke]

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.