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In October, Matt Cutts of Google at PubCon announced there would likely be a 15% reduction in authorship being displayed in the Google search results. Since then, I haven't seen many - I've seen some - complaints about authorship going away. But now, there seems to be a wave of complaints and reports of reduction.
If you check out the MozCast features graph and limit it to authorship, you will see a sharp decline. Keep in mind, this only analyzes about 10,000 queries or so, so it is not all that representative of the whole query base.
I have spotted complaints in the Google Webmaster Help forums (that is just one, there are many) and Google+ about reduction in authorship. I've received emails and tweets from people asking me what is going on.
Cyrus Shepard shared a single example of the Google results:
I lost my authorship for a long period time and then it came back by itself this year.
So is this the reduction of authorship Matt was talking about or just a blip in Google?
Forum discussion at Google+ and Google Webmaster Help.
Update: Matt Cutts has confirmed with me that this indeed did happen.
