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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

You say that the authorship markup won't reduce clickthrough, and that people won't think it's an ad. You're a SEO expert, so I guess I should trust your word on this. But why do you say this?

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.

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So doing an actual proper A/B split test is next to impossible due to a number of different factors but time and time again one of the quickest ways I have been able to boost SEO traffic to a site without doing a single thing to the rankings was to implement things like the authorship markup or other kinds of Microdata that triggers the rich snippets.

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.

> but time and time again one of the quickest ways I have been able to boost SEO traffic to a site

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?

He probably fixed it, having observed his CTR decreasing by 90%. Screenshot was for posterity (I saw it at the previous article, too.)

Those different factors can be controlled for. Interrupted time series analysis is done on things far more complex than "How many hits did a page get" every day.

I'm sorry but that sounds like an appeal to authority to me. The original author is basing his article on solid figures (which, granted, he may be interpreting incorrectly) whereas you are making an argument based on your intuition.

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.

Authority based on a large amount of actual experience is infinitely more useful than cherry-picking some random facts and ignoring several important details.

Appeal to authority is only a fallacy when the authority in question is an authority on something else.

E.g. asking an astronomer about global warming.

Or when there is no consensus among professionals of the discipline. I.e. dynamic typing vs static typing, or something of that ilk.

Appeals to authority are always deductively fallacious; even a legitimate authority speaking on his area of expertise may affirm a falsehood, so no testimony of any authority is guaranteed to be true.

source: http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/appeals/appeal-to...

Though to be fair you just used an appeal to authority to support your statement...

It seems to me your take on the matter follows the myth that more traffic is better. IMHO this is deeply flawed, focusing on quantity, as in increase traffic, and missing the part where you qualify traffic.

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.

I'd never click on it because of the face but that's just a single data point. :p

You are also assuming that your self-reported behaviour will match your actual behaviour. So it's probably rather less than a single data point. :p

While I could be fooling myself, I can actively recall thinking "blerg, blog posts as top results" and moving down the list.

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

I do the same about 98% of the time, most of the time intentionally but although because these links don't register as valid results to my brains.

In Google Analytics you can see your CTR in relation to ranking -> http://i.imgur.com/nhEMCRN.png

People do click on ads too. That part is easy to test.

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