Google has decided to fully remove the alluring authorship photos that you would have seen within the search results. In announcing this change, Google’s John Mueller stated that this measure from Google is a part of its mission to clean up the visual design of the company’s search results. The company is now bent upon bringing about an enhanced mobile experience and a design that is consistent across several devices. The present move is aimed at simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results. While the profile photo and circle counts are removed now, Google has confirmed that the click through behavior with the less crowded design is however similar to the previous one.

There have been some doubts that the click through rate might come down with this change. This can however come to light only when enough data is available for analysis. Google has also added that this move is concerned with the way authorship is shown in search. The implication is that the company is still processing and also using authorship marks. Therefore, the webmasters are not still deterred to add up authorship markups to their content. Google has advised the sites to go forward and build up the author authority in the appropriate way.

Over the last few years, Google had been doing a great deal to encourage webmasters and content writers to become part of its authorship program. As part of this venture, Google gave away the users opportunity to get their Google+ profile images displayed alongside their listings in the search results, which had given way to more clicks, visual branding possibilities and credibility building.

Amidst this background, Google’s recent move to remove photos from the search results has been viewed with surprise by several businesses. However, Google has said that this exercise is intended to keep the pages as clean as possible to enhance the user experience. Especially with the phenomenal increase of smartphone access of the net, this move is said to be necessary to give a consistent viewer experience across devices.

While Google claims that the present move has not impacted the click-through behavior, some experts have however opined that more information is needed before anything can be said in concrete about this. Some content experts believe that Google’s stand of removing authorship photos is a definite step towards achieving a mobile-optimized design aimed at presenting a unified format compatible with multiple devices.

There have also been some speculations that this step is meant to increase the CTR of Google’s ads in order to boost up the revenue. This opinion is attested by the finding that during the aftermath of removing the authorship photos, the CTR had increased by 44.8% in the internal testing of one advert.

During earlier times, Google became highly popular for its simplistic search engine offering profound search results. But over a period of time, the results got cluttered for no betterment. For instance, seeing the author’s photo next to an article is no guarantee for a viewer regarding the quality of the content. Thus, Google’s decision has been perceived in myriad ways while the true picture will take some more time to reveal itself.