Google+ Page Profile Photo in search

Provide a profile photo of your business for your Google+ Page. Your business profile photo appears in Google search results such as in local search.

Sometimes Google search even provides Street View for your business.

More Links for Google Author in Search

Google provides three more links (related) to read more from the same author to the user. These three more links for the author are displayed in the search if user hits back button (browser back button) after reading article/post from the same author (spent a bit time in previous article/post).

More from : http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-hidden-benefit-of-authorship-134526

Updated Specific Quality Webmaster Guidelines

Updated Webmaster Guidelines with more about the irrelevant keywords, rich snippets, monitoring site for hacking, removing hacked content, removing user generated spam.
Specific quality guidelines outline following techniques to avoid [ the updated and previous ].

updated 10/02/2012	updated 09/18/2012
Automatically generated content	Avoid hidden text or hidden links
Participating in link schemes	Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects
Cloaking	Don't send automated queries to Google
Sneaky redirects	Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords
Hidden text or links	Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
Doorway pages	Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
Scraped content	Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content
Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value	If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first
Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
Abusing rich snippets markup
Sending automated queries to Google
Engage in good practices like the following: Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site

from
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Google Updates Webmaster Guidelines

Google has updated its Webmaster Guidelines [updated 10/02/2012]. They have provided this updated guideline to find, index and crawl your website. Violations of Google guidelines results in low quality of SERPs or sometimes removal from the SERPs.

More:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/google-webmaster-guidelines-updated.html

Low quality exact match domains - Google Updates

Google updates their algo again and this time Google reduces search results for "exact match" domains with low quality.

New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012

Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 28, 2012

Google Webmaster specific quality guidelines

Google has provided specific quality guidelines in its Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines help your website get crawled and indexed.

- Do not use hidden text or link.
- Avoid cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Do not send automated queries to Google.
- Not to load pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Avoid duplicate content.
- Do not create pages with malicious programs
- No doorway pages to cheat search bots.
- Provide a value/reason for your customers to visit your site if your site uses affiliate program.

Resource:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Google Authorship in Search

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html

Google displays author information in the Google search results and if you want to display your authorship information for the content you create in the Google search results,
- you will need to create your Google+ profile and then verify authorship of your content, i.e link your Google+ Profile with the content you create.

Google provides following two methods to link your Google+ profile with the content you create. [ learn more ]
1.  Using verified email address to link to your content. i.e verify your email address (author@example.com) on the same domain as your content.
2. Build authorship by linking your content to your Google+ Profile.
- from your webpage, create a link to your Google+ profile. i.e <a href="[profile_url]?rel=author">Google</a>
- Edit your Google+ Profile, and add your website link in the "Contributor to" Section.

You can use structured data testing tool to check what author data Google has extracted.

More:
https://plus.google.com/authorship 
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986 
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html