15% of All Rich Snippets will be Cut from Search Engine Results Pages

Authorship has gotten a lot of attention in the last month. First when John Mueller, Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced in a recent Webmaster Central Hangout that Google doesn't "use authorship for ranking at the moment." This alone wasn't enough to get the SEO industry in an uproar. However, when Matt Cutts told PubCon attendees that they could expect to see a 15% reduction in the amount of rich snippets (which includes your authorships) displayed in the Google search results there was a collective moan. Would this be the end of the increased click throughs we've been seeing?!

Why take away so many rich snippets? Well, think about it logically. If every single listing included authorship markups the search results page would be flooded with authors. These listings would no longer stand out from the crowd - they'd become just another image in a sea of faces. The same goes with other markups. When Google allowed any and every page to jump into the enhanced markups it was all about ADOPTION. Now it's time for quality control to step in.

The promised 15% reduction is likely going to include low quality sites, poor content, spammy pages and content from authors that are not seen as growing industry experts. Does this mean you should stop claiming your content - No! Google is invested in the long term success of Author Rank and the concept is too solid for them to abandon.

Instead, be sure that you're claiming high quality content and that you're putting that content onto authoritative sites. Google may step away from the authorship markups as the main factor in collecting the data they need, but they will always remain a factor for Author Rank which will live on.

Once this phase of quality control has been implemented then it will be time for Google to dial authorship into their algorithm. Keep creating solid content and do your part to ensure that when Google draws that red line that you're not in the bottom 15%. Until then, we stand by the fact that authorship protects your content, increases click throughs and will help you be seen as the industry expert you are turning out to be.