I appreciated that jitbit stopped by HN to mention that they'd ended up with spammy links to their site and that they needed to do some clean-up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798569
Quite frankly Matt as someone who can't stand G+ I skip most mugg shot links as I have started assuming that it is going to be some crappy little G+ throw away post. So there is every chance that the person in question is getting less clicks due to the mugg shot.
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.
Jitbit found out their SEOs were buying spam links on porn sites. They got hammered by Penguin 2. How exactly are we managing to connect those dots to G+ and webmaster tools?
I have the opposite feeling, because I implemented authorship on my blog and for that authorship picture to happen the URLs have to have high ranking, otherwise they won't get shown. That's why I have come to associate authorship with popularity.
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.
According to wikipedia: "Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements".
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.
I'm not going to lie, I am a little bit geeked out to have Matt on the thread.
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.
I think the author has missed something. The first result wasn't a typical organic link. It was a Google+ enhanced link i.e. it mentions "this person in 30 Google+ circles".
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.
I assume that any result different from the basic result I'm used to is some crap google tries to push on me and having a few of those before they never land on relevant or useful content.
Which pretty much sums up my experience with google search over the last few years: less and less relevance and less and less usefulness.
Really good follow up to the referenced article posted here the other day -- I kind of wish we more often saw follow up articles like this (maybe we do and I just miss them)
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'm trying to get Matt to give some official or semi official numbers on this. I have worked in nothing but high end enterprise level stuff for a while which means I have all kinds of NDAs in place about any specifics. But speak with anyone who does this for a living, I'd be shocked if you could find a single credible person who would disagree (though I would love to hear their opinion).
I know, SEO folks always ask me to include authorship. My question is, do we actually know how effective it is or are we all using it because it's a feature that Google provides and therefore it's automatically assumed to be useful.
I didn't actually cover this in the article but it's probably worth addressing here. To answer your first question about do we know how effective it is, the answer is kind of in the sense that everyone I know in the industry who has implemented this for themselves and for clients has seen positive results without any exceptions (that I know of).
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?
The only people in the world that I have ever heard say they would not think on a link with the face because they thought it would be a social link or an ad are the people on Hacker News. Why this is I'm not really sure. But I have to agree with this article, Google authorship did not make their rankings decrease at all. It was other factors that they did not want to admit to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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
Maybe you should have read the article to the end before jumping to conclusions: "This was later confirmed when Google’s Head of Webspam: Matt Cutts showed up to weigh in on the thread and said directly that the reason this site saw such a large drop in traffic was because of Penguin and the questionable link building tactics that they had been advised to undertake."
"If you are hiring an external SEO agency, make sure they are providing you with complete transparency into everything they are doing."
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?
I was actually thinking of throwing something like this together at some point because people will continually get burnt by it time and time again.
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.
SEO agencies are dying and so are SEO "experts", it's an industry that is now 95% bullshit. There was a time when optimizing worked because site structure and content was very poor. This is no longer the case, the web has evolved and most sites are already SEO "friendly" right out of the box.
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".
95% agree with exactly this. I am more or less done with consulting personally for this reason. In fact as of last month I actively quit my consulting job and moved to South East Asia to work on development and start up ideas full time without any distractions and without crazy living costs.
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.
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