Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%

jitbit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 120 posts

Re: How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%

#91

Post by uts_ »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #55

Authorship had nothing to do with this site's drop. The site has been affected by our Penguin webspam algorithm and that accounts for the drop. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/penguin-2-0-rolled-out-today/ for details of the recent Penguin launch, or http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-s... for more information about Penguin in general.

These guys seem to have no problem with manipulating the search results will hundreds of thousands of paid links:

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/backlinks/subdomains/jitbit...

So it's really no surprise that Google's latest Penguin rollout has hurt them.

Sad to see it blamed on authorship.

Re: How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%

#92

Post by microtherion »

unreal37 wrote: post #47
Nursie wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. It screams blog/editorial content. I'm very, very rarely interested in blogs or editorials. Usually I seem to be after hard data or documentation.

Also screams "this site has been SEO'd to death". Better when every top result has a picture then it doesn't stand out so much.

To me, the title screamed “SEO’d to death”.

Re: How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%

#93

Post by tjohns »

weinzierl wrote: post #84
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to defend this (incorrect) blog post with that world view, but Google launched authorship markup before Google+: http://www.seoinc.com/seo-blog/google-launches-authorship-ma...

Assuming your ordinary niche blogger (no celebrity, no New York Times author, no one with a dedicated Wikipedia page): Is there a way to have a photo next to his or her search result if he or she doesn't have a Google account?

Generally speaking, the mechanism used for attribution is not specific to Google accounts. It's just a rel="me" or rel="author" hyperlink somewhere in your articles, and you can list multiple source of profile data. (Which is generally a good idea for semantic web purposes. Take a look at the social links on my website for an example.)

The Microformats Wiki has more details on how these work: http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-me http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-author

That said, I believe Google Search only knows how to extract author bios from the Google Profile database. Personally, I don't think this is different than having to creating a Webmaster Tools account if you want to view your website data -- it provides an authoritative, user-editable source of biographical data for the system to use.

(If this was scraped from across the web for everyone, I could imagine some folks getting upset if the wrong information is picked up. Case in point: I remember a while back when somebody's Wikipedia article listed them as dead, and that information was automatically pulled into the Knowledge Graph. Oops.)

That said, I'm not on any of the teams involved in creating this, so take all this with a grain of salt.

Re: How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%

#94

Post by mattmanser »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #74
mattmanser wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still #1 when I search and that's not even what he's talking about. He's claiming that having a G+ picture inserted next to search results is resulting in a much lower CTR than they previously had. Which I think is plausible as it detracts from the search experience, I often skip those results as the text isn't lined up so I can't scan it properly. Wish you could turn them off, it's really off putting. I also wonder…

I'm traveling, so it will be a while before I can check with the team, but the initial message that kicked off his investigation referred to clicks to his site, which I believe can include overall traffic to his site. I'll double-check when I'm back from traveling though. I was also responding to the overall headline of his site ("How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%") because there are other reasons fo…

The article is admittedly bad and rather annoyingly he doesn't seem to show the actual results for the page he was talking about.

Rather ironically at the moment it seems to be one of the best indicators that the article is farm spam and should be ignored. Apart from when I see your handsome face or Scott Hanselman's of course! Personally, I dislike the feature and wish I could turn it off for my search results, it adds negative value for me and I keep meaning to set up a script to disable it but my quick experiments in the dev console screwed with the page layout.

Could you tell us how much a picture improves or alternatively adversely affects the CTR? And which pictures are winners and which are losers? Or perhaps it has no effect? Stats!

Re: How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%

#95

Post by PavlovsCat »

muyuu wrote: post #42
crazygringo wrote: post #38

Not surprised at all. Any time I ever see a social photo next to a search result, I automatically assume it's a social media post or page and won't even bother to look at it, if I'm looking for anything else. Why on earth would anyone want a face associated with a program, website, or anything that's not a social media account? But, very good to know the statistical result.

I actively avoid mug shots. Face pics are often used to manipulate, esp. if it's "happy faces". I've developed a rejection to faces in websites. But honestly I didn't expect this to be common. Much the opposite.

As someone who never felt like putting his own mug on his own website, I appreciate that at least for one person out there it's not a minus :)

Re: How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%

#99

Post by [deleted] »

dchuk wrote: post #90
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did check that the site was affected by Penguin before I posted my comment.

Are you guys able to check that on a site by site basis internally? Like, did you just look up his site and there was a flag or something similar that only you can see that lets you know Penguin got him?

[deleted]

Re: How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%

#100

Post by walshemj »

scholia wrote: post #89
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Authorship markup launched before Google+ was even available to the outside world: http://www.seoinc.com/seo-blog/google-launches-authorship-ma...

Which is true but it's irrelevant to the current situation. Which is that lots of us (see below) have come to associate the mugshots with G+ posts, which are usually mediocre, so we don't even look at them. What people perceive governs how they behave, and your explanation won't change that.

Well the FTS100 and Global 500 Publisher I used to work for where very interested in using authorship and publisher markup up to stop crappy sites ripping our content off.

Farmers weekly where the most keen and you can see the result in the serps - though Matt why are you picking a pic from the Telegraph to go with thier articles?

Post reply on HN