Google has confirmed that there are current issues with displaying authorship rich snippets on “very few sites.” A Google spokesperson told us “it’s something we’re actively working on” but that only “it affects very few sites” on the internet.
This is a topic I’ve personally been tracking very closely, as my own site is impacted by this very limited bug. About a month ago, I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that my own face is not showing up in the search results for that site and there are dozens of other complaints from webmasters. This has been going on for months.
Sites that had authorship rich snippets displaying in the Google search results since it’s inception, suddenly noticed Google has dropped their faces from the search results.
Yesterday, Edmunds, one of the largest car informational sites on the internet, emailed us about the issue. They wrote to us that they have been having this issue since “early January,” like many of the other reports. They also told us that a Google representative told them directly that nothing is wrong on Edmunds side. This is the quote Edmunds sent us – although Google has not confirmed if it was authentic:
I’ve discussed with the team working on this and it doesn’t look like there is anything that can be done from your end at this point to expedite the process. Rest assured the team is aware of your request and is doing everything possible internally to make this work as quickly as seemlessly as possible, we try to support as many different site designs as possible, but we still have issues that are being worked out.Thanks for your continued patience, I will send another update as soon as I have one.
I did ask John Mueller of Google about this back in early June, you can see my question to him about one minute and fifty seconds into the video below. He basically said my code was fine and that it was algorithmic related.
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This issue has been impacted the click through rate of established and respected sites, such as Edmunds and my own, for about 6 months now. Google has said it is impacting “very few sites” but that they are “actively working on” a fix. Google however has not given us an estimate time for the fix to be rolled out.