Google Authorship Didn't Decrease Your Traffic by 90%
aberrant.me
aberrant.me
Original article: http://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship-decreas...
HN Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5792268
Matt Cutts' HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5793803
This incident reminded me a bit of http://www.ecommercefuel.com/seo-mistakes-organic-traffic/ .
Let's put all that aside what this situation is highlighting is just how terrible the webmaster tools data really is. I have clients that have not ranked for a keyword for over year yet webmaster tools is still telling them they are ranking. All this serves to do is confuse them. Which seems to be the point of what Google does these days.
You keep banging on about increased transparency but the fact is we don't need more badly made webmaster help videos. We need accurate stats and the promised accurate feedback as to what has gone wrong.
On my blog only the 6 most popular articles have authorship info in the search results, generating about 300 visits from organic search per day. And my blog is a highly technical blog that targets developers and I haven't seen any drops in traffic due to authorship.
Also, people here make the assumption that regular folks behave like us. They don't.
To me there's not much organic left in google results, due to the filter bubble, tracking and lack of transparency on the ranking algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised to learn google boost ranking of results linked to google + accounts, which makes it self-promotion of their services and unnatural ranking.
Anyways I stay away from any result which doesn't look like a result I'm used to, so no click for those google sponsored results.
On a related note though, is there any chance of releasing any data around CTR improvements with Authorship pictures displayed.
I can think of a couple of reasons why you might not want to do that directly but I think you guys have a good history around the ability to confirm something without really saying too much that might be considered sensitive.
http://stats.grok.se/en/201305/macro%20recorder
Not sure that these results are conclusive either way. They're somewhat higher in the last week (even ignoring 5/30 and on due to the meta-attention).
Chalk me up as another data point that thinks I'd be less likely to click on a link if I saw the face there.
From my personal perspective when I see a link like that I won't click it. Because I assume that it is going to a Google+ page which like Facebook pages will have general and not context-specific content. That and the fact that showing a person's photo makes it seem like it is a "one man" operation as opposed to a successful company.
Which pretty much sums up my experience with google search over the last few years: less and less relevance and less and less usefulness.
If you have authorship markup and you are the #1 result or the only result on the page with authorship people will skip you and click on something else
Almost no one at all in the SEO industry is going to agree with this statement, almost all of us have example after example after example of where the exact opposite has happened. I’m sorry but you’re wrong on this one.
Care to share some data? I for one am discouraged by happy faces next to an article.
I know that doesn't make it a FACT (though it's extremely compelling in my books) but no one outside of Google can actually provide you with the true numbers needed to answer the question unfortunately.
But to address the second point about why every SEO person is losing their mind about Authorship, it's to do with more of a long term play. The general consensus at the moment in the industry is that Google is desperately trying to move further and further away from signals that are more easily manipulated than things such as links.
As a result you have things like Google+ and Authorship coming into play, and even if they aren't officially ranking signals RIGHT NOW it's almost a certainty that that won't always be the case. The reason why this is so important though: it's fairly rare in SEO that you get many chances to get a massive head start on your competitors by becoming an early adopter of some technology, this however is looking like it is going to be one of those times.
So it all comes down to the fact of, when the day comes where they DO contribute to rankings and you decide that you need to do it anyways, do you want to be starting from scratch or do you want to know that you already put a year or two into building up what they consider to be an authoritative authorship profile?
Which in return will supposedly give you more "don't know better" people and "don't care" people.
Have you run user tests and observed that users click more or an equivalent amount on results with the authorship markup at the top of the page? Have you done A/B tests and examined the results?
I ask, because to me my instinct would be that it is a paid ad, because it looks like one, and the authorship markup is weird. If not a paid ad, I'd assume it was a G+ social result, and I NEVER click those.
I totally take your point on board about finding the results looking like ads to you but from everything I have seen to date you would firmly be in the minority. Don't under estimate how "not informed" most people are. There is still a very very sizeable portion of users who can't distinguish things the other way around and think that the ads are organic results.
But if you are going for increasing traffic across the board and you don't specifically target some niche like say the HN crowd who find it weird or spammy, I would say Authorship and Rich Snippets are absolutely the way to go.
My only caveat is that I wouldn't be putting it across the whole site. Like JitBit have done with the stuff on their product pages. That might legitimately confuse some people in certain instances and it's really not what it was designed for in the first place. Blogs and news content though is perfect and as I said, works consistently well in all of my experiences and those of everyone else I know in the industry.
Do you have any data at all that directly tests the effect of headshots on organic search results? Extrapolating from other rich metadata decoration is invalid. Small changes in design can lead to big differences in user behavior. That's why we A/B test in the first place.
E.g. asking an astronomer about global warming.
source: http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/appeals/appeal-to...
I'm curious what type of sites these were. I could imagine it working for a blog or a professional service, where the face behind the business counts. But for a business website, having an informal photo of a single person, an increase in CTR runs counter to my intuition.
BTW, when I searched "macro recorder", I did not see the G+ profile picture next to the search listing. Is this something that Google is rolling out piecemeal, or does it only display for his personalized search results?
Less traffic but of better quality is an actual improvement, more traffic of unknown quality could be an improvement or not, maybe those additional people are bouncing.
What is a certainty though is that your web server consume more resources and bandwidth due to traffic increase, and now you may have to refactor and optimize or pay to upgrade your hardware/hosting.
Funny thing is, I don't have a problem with blog posts, it just comes across as commercialised and my brain doesn't generally associate commercialised results with value.
That might be irrational, but that's what I'm going to continue self-reporting. :p
Deleted comment
Being someone who is not a SEO expert, I find it very hard to distinguish black hat from white hat techniques beyond simple basics. In software development there has arisen certain schools of thought for want of a better word, 'Agile' and 'Software craftsmanship' being two examples.
I would love for someone to put a name to their philosophical approach to SEO. Making it easier for practitioners and non practitioners alike to align behind professional approaches in a more informed manner.
It seems to me that there are a bunch of SEO techniques anyone could use but that most people would consider to be immoral or unethical, this is not a question of skill but rather willingness to act with a low ethical bar.
I seems to me that google is very keen to penalize unethical techniques in the long term and so long term practitioners and clients who take a white hat approach should gain greater success with less risk over time.
My challenge to practitioners who wish to set themselves apart ethically is that you come together and create a whitehat SEO Manifesto. What defines your values around doing to SEO? What are you NOT prepared to do?
It's sadly how I saw a lot of money being made in my consulting experience through clearing up other peoples mess.
As I mentioned in the post I am happy to help the guys at JitBit for free to help get them on the right track towards clearing this up because I hate seeing unethical places get away with this kind of crap.
As some very basic and high level advice you can do a couple of things to help yourself out. If you want to get a decent feel for someone before engaging them you should ask them to show you examples of clients they have worked on in the past. Take that URL and run it through a tool like Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO or Ahrefs.
If it looks even a little bit spammy I would run the other direction because you are about to pay money to hurt yourself which is the worst of both worlds.
If they can't explain to you in a decent amount of detail exactly what they will be doing then you are about to get shafted.
It's such simple stuff that no expertise is typically required. Google is essentially emulating the end user, so cater to the user instead of chasing Google's tail. It's Google's job to figure out what the good content and relevant links are, literally and financially, so plan for the long term and let them figure it out.
ps. There are some markets such as large e-commerce/products/multi-location/etc that do need expertise especially if they messed it all up, but most consulting consists of "make friendly urls" and "write good content that people actually want to see".
I can't remember the exact link at the moment but I remember reading something from patio11 where he was saying that the reality is that unless you have absolute mega $$$ to spend then every SEO you can afford is going to give you advice like the above because so much of the industry is based on bullshit and regurgitated blog posts that someone came across.
All of the good ones are already off doing their own thing or are simply out of your price range.
The one thing I do disagree with is that there is no longer advice that goes beyond the level that you just described. Believe me when you get to a certain level of this it goes way beyond that. Go and ask 90% of SEOs how to map out the ideal IA of a large dynamic website for example.