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.