Why Google Authorship Still Matters
If you've been using Google lately—and let's face it, who hasn't been using Google lately—then you may have noticed the absence of those tiny smiling mugs of hundreds of authors. This is no coincidence. On June 25th, Google's John Mueller announced on his Google+ page that Google Authorship was changing face. Literally.
Mueller's announcement revealed Google's plans to remove author photos and author circle counts from the search results. According to his post, this is part of a big cleanup, and a push to be more mobile friendly. The author photos took up too much real estate, so they had to go. This, of course, left the SEO and content marketing worlds in an uproar, with more than a few conspiracy theories about increasing Google's ad revenue.
Why We All Wanted Google Authorship in the First Place
It's no secret that Google pushes its products, and there's plenty of speculation that certain Google services might even help with search rankings. There was a time when nearly every blog owner scrambled to get Google Authorship on their site. Authorship meant more than just a little picture next to your search result. It meant authority and higher click-through rates. Or at least that's what Google said.
Why You Still Need Authorship
Google isn't backing down from their claims about higher click-through rates. However, it seems they are now attributing it to authorship in general, as opposed to that eye-catching picture. Mueller's post highlighted the Google research that showed similar click-through rates without photos. Of course, there's no official word on whether this comparable CTR is from Google's perspective or from a site owner's perspective. Either way, no one is going to stop using Google because of this. Nor should you stop using Google Authorship.
Even without the photo, authorship still adds the authority to your site. It may be a reduced amount of in-your-face presence, but anyone familiar with the search results can still see your name by your posts. This tells the world that you are an expert—or at least that you know how to set up authorship.
Additionally, authorship tells Google more about your website. When you can mark up your site properly with authorship and schema, you are improving your on-page SEO. Photos may be gone, but SEO is far from dead. As Google continues to make changes (over 380 last year alone, according to Mueller), we need to do everything we can to stay in the game.