Google is placing the authorship rich snippet author image all over the search results these days. Heck, if you are an SEO and do SEO related searches, you probably see my mug shot all over Google. I am not the prettiest person to look at, which may lead to a lower click through rate on my stories compared to someone like Sarah Perez.

Seriously, which story would you rather click on?

A WebmasterWorld thread has one webmaster claiming that when he added the authorship markup, it actually lead to a lower click through rate from the Google search results. So what he did was change the picture and his click through rate spiked!

Soon enough we are going to have to worry about pornography in these authorship tags. I guess that is why Google released a report rich snippet spam tool.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.