Google Is Apparently Reducing Authorship In Results

Matt Cutts spoke at Pubcon in Las Vegas, discussing numerous SEO topics as usual. Bruce Clay has a pretty good basic recap here.

You can see 25 minutes of his speech here:

There doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of big news to come out of the keynote. He discussed a lot of the things Google has been doing that everybody already knows about. He did say that Google is going to be working on combatting hacking and child porn in the coming months, and noted that the reason that Toolbar PageRank hasn’t been updated is because the export feature that sends the data to the toolbar broke, and they didn’t bother to fix it. It’s unclear if they will bother in the future. My guess is no. Trends for webmasters to think about going forward, according to Cutts, include making sure your site looks good on mobile devices, annotating your forms for autocomplete and rich snippets (on reputable sites). Google is also getting better at Javascript. Meanwhile, the page layout algorithm will start having a greater impact on Arabic and Russian sites. One interesting nugget to come out of Cutts’ speech is that Google is apparently going to be reducing the amount of authorship results it shows by 15%, saying that this will improve quality. Google reportedly still sees authorship as a key signal, they just want to “tighten” it to make sure it’s really relevant and useful, from what I gather.