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Google's December Authorship Shake-up
Back in mid-December, the newly launched MozCast Feature Graph showed a significant short-term drop in the number of tracked searches displaying authorship mark-up. Here's a 30-day view of the data (from November 22, 2013 to December 21):
The graph shows the percentage of queries that displayed authorship mark-up (to any degree) on page 1 of Google (note: the Y-axis has been constrained to the range of the data). This data ranges from a peak of 23.71% on Nov. 24 to a low of 20.03% on Dec. 19, a relative drop of 15.5%.
Was it foretold at Pubcon?
If you follow the search industry closely, that 15% may sound familiar. Back in October, Matt Cutts took the stage at Pubcon and suggested that a 10-15% reduction in authorship seemed to improve search quality. Many took this as a sign that Google had reduced the amount of authorship mark-up appearing in SERPs or would reduce it soon.
The graph above is a bit cherry-picked, in terms of the timeframe. So, let's expand it to 60 days, including Matt's announcement at Pubcon (which happened on Oct. 23):
Interestingly, authorship actually climbed a bit after Matt's announcement, before eventually dropping. There was a 9.6% relative drop from Oct. 23 to Dec. 19. These numbers all line up pretty well with Matt's predicted 10-15% range, and he confirmed around Dec. 19 that the authorship change had rolled out. Since Dec. 19, authorship presence in our data set has ranged from 19.8% to 20.3%. There has been no substantial recovery.
Did authorship counts drop?
When you think about a reduction in authorship, there are actually two very different possible interpretations. You could see what the graphs above show – that, overall, less searches displayed authorship mark-up. These graphs only indicate whether queries had authorship mark-up or didn't, in all-or-none fashion.
The other possible interpretation is that, within the searches that displayed authorship mark-up, fewer results would get that mark-up. So, let's compare the peak date of Nov. 24 to the 60-day low of Dec. 19. The following table breaks down the searches with authorship by the count of results that displayed authorship mark-up (as a percentage of the total searches with authorship):
The vast majority of SERPs, before and after the shake-up, displayed one result with authorship mark-up. There aren't really any major differences until you get down to 5/page, and at that point the number of data points is so small that it's difficult to say the difference is meaningful. The mean number of results displaying authorship mark-up on Nov. 24 was 1.326, which fell slightly to 1.305 on Dec. 19.
There was a slight shift toward searches where only one result showed mark-up, but the general proportions remained roughly the same in our data set. If you're curious, the query that broke the 10/10 mark was "best android phones" (although I'm currently only seeing 8 results with mark-up for that search).
Which searches lost mark-up?
Between Nov. 23 and Dec. 19, 628 searches lost authorship mark-up in our data set. For reference, here's a set of 20 relatively high-volume queries from that list of 628:
- vpn
- bruce springsteen
- tractor supply
- nectar
- astrology
- fisher price
- pilates
- gadgets
- linksys
- ie8
- acne
- hernia
- multiple sclerosis
- malaria
- copd
- crohn's disease
- tattoo designs
- command and conquer
- web design
- fashion bug
It's also worth noting that many of these queries have a news component and probably a QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) aspect to them, so the day-to-day presence of authorship mark-up can vary with the actual results returned. This calculation is almost certainly done in real-time and can be highly dynamic. Google doesn't have a list of domains that either get authorship mark-up or don't – they're making a decision on the fly based on the interaction of the query, page, and domain.
What can you do about it?
It's important to realize that, while losing authorship mark-up for some of your search terms may be upsetting, this is not a penalty in the traditional sense. Google has lowered the volume, so to speak – they seem to feel that authorship was too prominent and that the quality bar may have been set a little too low.
So, if you lost mark-up, does that mean your site is necessarily low quality? No, at least not in the sense you or I understand the word. It's more likely that Google was awarding authorship mark-up simply based on on-page tags or superficial factors and wasn't looking at how those factors were supported by other ranking signals. So, you may need a bit more corroborating evidence (a solid link profile, social mentions, etc.) to get your authorship to be recognized.
Ultimately, authorship mark-up is a nice-to-have, but don't bet the farm on it. Google+ is only 2-1/2 years old, and Google is just beginning to understand how to measure authorship and individual authority (what some people call "AuthorRank", although that implies a specific metric that may or may not exist yet). Improving your individual authority and building your social profiles makes sense for many reasons, but getting hung up on the micro-details of authorship mark-up and watching it appear and disappear day-by-day is probably only going to drive you crazy.
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