Google's Matt Cutts indicated last fall that Google would be reducing the rate at which authorship appears in search results in an effort to combat spam. In his keynote address at Pubcon Las Vegas, Cutts said that eliminating roughly 15 percent of the lower-quality authors could significantly increase the number of high-quality authors who are able to appear in results.

Until December's update, Google displayed all authorship information in results whenever it was available. If you linked your site to...