Why Your Google Authorship Photo Suddenly Stopped Displaying In Search Results
Why Your Google Authorship Photo Suddenly Stopped Displaying In Search Results
If you have Google authorship setup on your site or blog and working properly, you may have noticed in recent weeks that your photo is no longer being displayed in relevant Google search results. Even if you haven't come across this issue, do a quick Google search for a topic that you know will return your site in the search results. If you don't see your Google+ photo displayed and you know for a fact that it once did, this may shed some light on what's going on.
rel=author" and that my contributor section on my profile had reciprocal links back to the sites with all my authorship content. After verifying all that, I was still baffled as to why it wasn't working. Then on one snowy day being stuck inside from a blizzard, I found this thread: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/gTt2Bj6zQdo After reading through practically every thread, I was finding that this was a common issue but wasn't finding a succinct reason as to why this was occurring. Until I came across two responses from two different posters: Grace Massa Langlois and David Deering.
Thanks to these helpful souls, I learned that Google was doing some experimenting behind the scenes lately with rich snippets, including authorship snippets which has resulted in sometimes your profile image and your author name not being displayed. And sometimes it's just your author name, and sometimes neither. I realized my authorship was working just fine, hence why it was displaying my author name in search results and not my photo.
Check these links below for a more in depth explanation.
http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/gTt2Bj6zQdo/aNSE6V-XuYIJ
http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/gTt2Bj6zQdo/kk935OEieiAJ
