Good Bye Picture in Google Authorship

The search world was rocked by the announcement by Google’s Webmaster trends analyst John Mueller that Google will be removing all author photos and Google+ view counts from search results on both desktop and mobile. This change will roll out to all users over the next few days.

The pressing question for most people is why would Google do this? The next question, if you’ve personally invested in implementing Google Authorship, is what this means for the future of the Authorship program and any possible “author rank.”