While Google Authorship has continued to increase in popularity despite Matt Cutts admission that it does not really help in the SERPs, it seems troubled lately.
The benefit, of course, is that users seem to trust links that have clear authorship designation and will click through those links more quickly. But what happens when the tell-tale author image disappears from the displayed links?
We’re not really sure what has been happening lately, but Google Authorship has gone down twice in the last week. Last Thursday and again on Wednesday the 28th, authorship just disappeared from the search results. In both instances the downtime was only over several hours so pundits tend to say it’s a just a bug. Certainly something to watch.