The way content is now “owned” by authors has been a long time coming – it’s only right that people that create good content at different locations get some kind of kudos. Google’s release of authorship was certainly a positive for many bloggers and businesses with the ability to enhance your organic listings massively by including a nice little image of you in the SERPS and a link to your Google profile.

So this morning I logged in and saw the following:

The position of the author image has moved from the far right to inside the organic listings – this will undoubtedly increase CTR’s considerably – especially on search results where there are currently no other authors using the correct markup. As you can see in this screen grab, my site is currently loosing the battle against all these other pretty listings i.e. Rand, Matt Cutts and Mr Sullivan!

Although I have now set this up, thanks to My Blogger Tricks:

I can’t take credit for this discovery of Google’s latest test in the UK but a colleague at work discovered on a brand related search an expanded information based result occupying the the top left PPC position.

Click to expand:

What’s interesting is where the data is being pulled from, you’ll see in the screenshot below that Google takes “Facts from 7 websites including en.wikipedia.org, gb.kompass.com and linkedin.com”. This is quite a powerful addition to any brand listing having this appear and supports the need for brands to have positioning on those areas.