Google Authorship Didn't Decrease Your Traffic by 90%

http://aberrant.me/no-google-authorship-didnt-decrease-your-traffic-by-90/

by mhoad • 13 years ago

133 40 13 years ago

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)

mhoad7• 13 years ago

I'm glad you liked it. Was my first blog post on the site and seemed like a good topic worth tackling to help clear up any confusion.

dariusm5• 13 years ago

For those that missed the original HN post:

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

Matt_Cutts• 13 years ago

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

This incident reminded me a bit of http://www.ecommercefuel.com/seo-mistakes-organic-traffic/ .

flaktrak• 13 years ago

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.

mhoad7• 13 years ago

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.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

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.

mhoad7• 13 years ago

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.

nhebb• 13 years ago

> 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?

Fomite• 13 years ago

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.

underwater• 13 years ago

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.

cliqui6• 13 years ago

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.

ownagefool2• 13 years ago

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

andybak• 13 years ago

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

cliqui6• 13 years ago

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.

roguecoder• 13 years ago

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

fireworks10• 13 years ago

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

evolve2k• 13 years ago

"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?

mhoad7• 13 years ago

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.

wyck• 13 years ago

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".

mhoad7• 13 years ago

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.

threeseed• 13 years ago

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.

cliqui6• 13 years ago

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.

Steko• 13 years ago

Since the author assumed everyone was clicking the second link (wikipedia), I'm surprised he didn't check to see:

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.

johnjlocke• 13 years ago

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.

cliqui6• 13 years ago

Well now you know that to keep hackers, technical minded and competent people out of your website you just have to register to google authorship.

Which in return will supposedly give you more "don't know better" people and "don't care" people.

tambourine_man2• 13 years ago

I agree with everything on the article, but:

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.

mhoad7• 13 years ago

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).

tambourine_man2• 13 years ago

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.

Google Authorship Didn't Decrease Your Traffic by 90%

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