From time to time, DirectiveGroup team members will share their views on a piece by an industry thought leader. Here, Mark discusses the recent change to Google’s search results.
What happen to the little photos in the Google search results? Josh Mueller, a Google webmaster rep, announced that Google was doing away with the authorship photos. In his short post (see here) he reasoned that Google was trying to make search results consistent across devices and photos basically clutter up the search results. Understandable.
What‘s the real reason Google removed the Authorship photos?
While I do believe Google is always making an attempt to improve search results for users, at the end of the day, I think it’s possible that the photos were drawing too much attention. Yes attention. Attention from Google’s Ad platform Adwords (of course this is all speculative).
Adwords may not be as popular as it was 10 years ago, but still a significant revenue source for Google. And other platforms like Facebook has stepped up their marketing game recently (just check your Facebook news feed for confirmation).
Google’s always changing.
In the end, Google is always changing or evolving – depending on how you see it. And for those of us that have been consistently marketing online over the last 5 to 10 years. This evolution with Google is all we know and what we expect.
What do you think?
Is it about the money?
You can see John’s full post here: https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j
