I wonder if your Google+ Profile picture was your JitBit Name + Logo, you would have done better.
I think it is your face that is the problem. Not because it's ugly, but because it's obviously a face, which is out of context when searching for "macro recorder". We naturally gloss over things that don't sync with what we expect.
This is 100% right. A quick confirmation: "John Mu of Google has confirmed that you must have a headshot of yours in order to see your Google Plus avatar in Google’s rich snippet."
i agree. i have even misread "Marco" instead of "Macro" in the title. with the face next to the content, and me looking for a technical tool and not a person, i'd have skipped to #2 as well.
Good observation. So basically, the fact that Google authorship did this is a good thing for people who search Google, because until now his title could "trick" people into clicking on his site (because it was more SEO optimized or for whatever reason), but the "real" result was always the Wikipedia one - because I suppose most people don't have a purchase intent when searching for that, but an intent to find out more information about it.
The photo is a tell-tale to me. Each time I see one on the first search results, they get filtered out by my brain (they are either 'news' or 'youtube').
Yes, having a photo (or perhaps any image) that modifies the layout of a search result instantly makes that search result look like an ad and not a true search result for me. Particularly if it's the first in the list, then it gets categorized as an advertisement by my brain.
We have been trained by more than a decade of abusive internet ads to ignore them. Does Google have results that show that these abnormally layouts result in an improved number of clicks, I wonder? Is it just us?
I know this isn't suppose to be funny, but I couldn't help but laugh at how you presented this. I completely lost it where you had written "My Stupid Face" with an arrow pointed towards your google result.
That is pretty fascinating. It seems like Facebook, who I use because this was their early marketing strategy, is teaching us to ignore data that has peoples faces associated with it. I wonder if there is broader research being done on this?
This is fairly well researched wrt banners. Basically once users associate visual elements with noise, the will start to automatically filter them to the point of not being conscious about their existence.
In a even broader scope, Jakob Nielsen has shared lots of data from his eye tracking usability studies that show just how little attention users pay to online content [1][2].
I would love to hear more on this. Are others seeing this problem as well and what photo are they using ?
My first thought when seeing the photo was ok, this is a guy giving his opinion on the topic, I'm not interested in opinion, I want the facts.
Can companies act like an author on G+ ?
Interesting...you think of all the A/B metrics that Google tests, this would be among one of the most obvious standouts. The percentage of users who click on lower-ranked results is reportedly a big factor in the decision of how results are laid out and paginated (e.g. if the 12th result in Google SERP had a relatively similar amount of "usefulness" as the 10th, it's likely that Google would have the search pages show 12 results)...you'd think a statistical drop in first-result clicks would trigger an analytics alarm.
+1. You have to think many sites besides the OP's experience a similar effect. This, combined with Google's collective UX wisdom and the not-at-all unintuitive nature of the result, makes it pretty shocking that they have not put a stop to this. Maybe they are getting some value from the uptick in people maintaining G+ accounts, so it's being swept under the rug?
You're assuming this is generally true. All we know is that it seems to be true for this one guys site/picture. Google has access to ALL of the data for this feature. They're in a much better position to make an informed decision on its value.
You can't take one very specific case and then extend it to the entire corpus of searches / web sites. Any change to the SRP might result in less-than-optimal impact on a particular search but if it improves performance for a large number of other searches, it's still a good change overall.
For a lot of people the face gives credibility. It makes you think it's a more legit article because somehow google took the time to associate an image with the article which it would never with spam content.
And it's too bad they don't accept company logos, I think that would really help. It downplays company we pages versus articles.
This happened with the Puppet type reference search result. Still feel weird clicking it with the guy's picture next to it. Makes it feel like it's his page when I want to believe it belongs Puppet.
- "Most people were clicking the #2 result." Huh?!? How do you possibly know that people are clicking the 2nd result? You don't. Unless you have access to Wikipedia's analytics, you have NO WAY in knowing. So what you're saying could be true--but could not be true. It's your interpretation, not fact.
- I'm seeing paid ads for "macro recorder", thus you're the first after the paid ads. "macro record" is a bad example of this. A true test would be to unverify for at least a week and see if you have more or less clicks. That is if you end up staying the #1 result. I bet that your rankings would change if you un-verified your site's authorship.
- I still see no proof that your traffic went down based on Google Authorship (your photo appearing). So, what you're saying is that you had 90 percent more traffic before you verified authorship? Putting your photo there caused a loss in traffic? I'm not seeing enough proof of that (you're not showing any analytics data).
The quality of the photo can make a huge impact on clickthroughs. Cyrus Shepard of (seo)Moz saw a 35% increase in click-through rates after a/b testing his profile photo:
http://moz.com/blog/google-author-photos
He also mentioned that, "Bounce rate dropped while time-on-site and page views increased. It's as if having an authoritative photo in the search results raised users' trust in my site and expectations of authority."
This is one of the reasons I asked my Facebook friends to A/B test two photographs I have used as profile photos before setting my Google+ photo. I should probably be a lot more rigorous about this, but at the very least a photograph should be compared to other available photographs for what it says about your online persona.
When you're assessing the viability of microdata or any SEO strategy for that matter, you have to consider the context and whether or not it works for the market that you're in.
I don't see this as an indictment of Google Authorship at all; rather this is an example of a situation where user intention is misaligned with what a webmaster is showing. If I'm looking for content (particularly the originator of said content), having the author's name and face is exactly what I'm looking for. When you're searching for car parts or baby strollers or software, that same name/face is going to throw you off.
If someone was looking for macro-recorder, they probably just wanted a download link.
His authorship link makes it look like a review of some macro recorder software. I would actually consider an authorship link that's being triggered by a product page a bug that needs to be corrected ASAP.
EDIT: Strangely enough his authorship image is still triggered by a search for "macro-recorder". Did he reactivate it?
Now imagine if Google allowed him to tag his page with a "Software Download" tag.. and enabled him to attach a appstore like icon next to the search result instead of his face. Would that drive more clicks?
My question is, why did you add authorship sitewide? Authorship should be established only on jitbit.com/news/ where your blog is, NOT on your entire website. For example, if I search jitbit in google, your authorship photo is appearing for your domain, not good.
Yes, this mars the result. I wonder if things are different when it's only on blog posts.
Blog post search results are also more likely to field multiple results with authorship pictures.
Still, worrisome if it's the only top ranked result with a photo. I imagine this will fade over time as people get used to it, took me a few months to figure out what was going on, as a user.
If you hadn't mentioned this, I wouldn't even know that Authorship could be associated with just a directory. I bet a lot of people, including the OP, fall into that category. If the OP just associated it with his onsite blog (/news/), then essentially the only purpose of Google Authorship would be promote his company blog, not his overall site. So he would be G+ blogging to promote his blog to promote his products. Sounds a bit convoluted to me.
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?
I'm in the same boat. If I'm looking for actual information, products, etc., I'll skip the posts with the headshots. It strangely reduces my trust level of the content.
Having said that, we're all in the tech field and this guy's product seems to be geared towards the tech field. Perhaps the result for the population-at-large is different?
>Why on earth would anyone want a face associated with a program, website, or anything that's not a social media account?
A coworker runs one of those aggregate-amazon-affiliate-link sites (think http://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/) for camping and outdoorsy things. He saw a noticeable increase in traffic by associating his wife's picture in his search results. He's of the opinion that a pretty face helps sell things.
I've watched that website launch and develop with some interest. Without disclosing any particulars, does the site do well for him? I imagined he was raking in the dough, but if he's still your co-worker I guess that's not the case?
To be clear, my coworker doesn't run thisiswhyimbroke, but a site with a similar layout.
It's a little extra money in his pocket, but not something profitable or rewarding enough to do full time. (He also has a few other attempts that don't do as well as the camping one, and with the camping one the income is pretty seasonal).
It makes the search result look like it's to a personal site or a blog - not a business. It would be good of Google if they allowed you to associated authorship with your site but opt out of the head shot in search results.
I would want a face associated with a program, website etc.
If I search for "digital camera" and see results from friends that are heavily into digital cameras I will likely consider that result.
If I search for "video editing software" or "ramen recipes" or "pizza in sf" I would love to see which things my friends are recommending more than I would like to see what is highest ranked by some algorithm.
I unconsciously ignore anything that isn't in the standard format that the normal results are presented in, a side-effect of so many "sponsored" links always being shoved to the top.
There's the "crap at the top" that is almost never what I'm looking for, and then there's the real results, which is what I scan for.
Just as an counter example: I search a lot of Java questions, and there is a guy who has a lot of useful answers. When I see his face in the SERP I often click it without reading the text.
As someone who for the past several years has done very high end legitimate SEO consulting to fortune 500 style companies (i.e. not the spammy mess than the HN crowd would usually associate with SEO), I am more than happy to go on the record and say that for what it's worth, this is the exception and not the rule.
As a few others here have pointed out, slapping Google Authorship markup all over your site is probably not a good idea unless you run a pure news / blog style site.
One other point to note though as well is that I am very familiar with that message in GWT telling you that traffic dropped by a crazy percentage overnight. Given everything going on in the SEO space at the moment, I am not entirely convinced just yet that you don't have a case of correlation rather than causation at the moment.
The author's takeaways are pure speculation as to causation, but he presents them as if they are facts. I could claim that people just don't like the color of his photo, and I would have as much evidence to support this has he has for his other claims re: authorship placement. And he doesn't mention that since he is not doing a split test (since it's not possible) and he's not measuring confidence intervals that his "A/B test" may be meaningless.
His intuition makes sense, and his conclusions are probably correct in this specific case, but this is shoddy analysis and shouldn't be presented in a generalized manner as he's done here.
On seeing what it did, my first thought was that the result with his picture next to it was one of those horrible promoted pages/adverts. I'm used to just skimming over the first results that look different to the rest with Google.
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.)
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.
Maybe a little nit picky but that's a bit of an assumption especially in the context of the article.
I guess it shows the importance of having more diverse results, you want other results appearing that strongly link to you positively (our official twitter/fb/software reviews for example)
That sucks; sorry to hear it happened to you. But I can tell you why I will usually scan search results (or C-s) for Wikipedia over other results: Wikipedia won't jerk me around. What I mean by that is that (currently) Wikipedia doesn't require JS, flash or any other BS; WP pages load quickly, and are often informative, not some wink-wink-nudge-nudge advertising that may or may not tell you about the product without requiring an email address. Oh, and WP doesn't (currently) have advertising.
That being said, I've been noticing that results returned in Google, even for technical posts (eg, Emacs howtos) have more and more been including headshots from the writer. It's the same posts I would have trusted before, it just seems weird to actually have a face to go along with the post.
I think you meant: it just seems weird to actually have a face to go along with the search results.
And when I think about it, that's the whole issue: I'm beginning to think that images (of authors or webmasters or product logos) don't belong on the serarch results page--ever. I can't see a case where it helps the average person who is searching because the photo is always once removed from the actual content.
If I search for a "thingamabob" how does the photo of somebody who wrote about thingamabob help me choose a result? If I'm searching for a company, even the company logo doesn't help because I may not know it ahead of time. Or if I'm looking for a blog, how would I know the face of the blogger ahead of time? I just can't see that many searches where the author's face is relevant to choosing the content you want to see.
Then there is the issue of Google putting the photo in the hottest part of the user's heat-map eye-scan of the search results page. If you put an irrelevant item where the user is looking for immediate relevancy, that result will get skipped (just as the OP postulated and so many commenters are confirming here on HN).
Finally, you have to wonder what Google was really thinking. If images do have an impact on click-through rate, then the images will get SEO'd and become useless. There is a comment on this thread that confirms that putting a woman's picture for the authorhip increased hits. Great, soon every website will appear to be written by a hot babe showing skin (or hot guy depending on the target audience), or if logos are allowed, all competitors will have a logo that looks like the #1 in the field.
119 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 599 ms ] threadI think it is your face that is the problem. Not because it's ugly, but because it's obviously a face, which is out of context when searching for "macro recorder". We naturally gloss over things that don't sync with what we expect.
[1] https://plus.google.com/authorship
source: http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/social-media/log...
Was an interesting experiment and one that I would like to take further.
100% the same with me!
I wonder if he tried a better more professional photo if the results would change.
1. I thought it was giving results for a guy named Marco.
2. After realizing it was Macro, I thought the #1 result was a blog or review.
3. I then focused on the 2nd result because it looked less cluttered.
But this is just my reaction.
We have been trained by more than a decade of abusive internet ads to ignore them. Does Google have results that show that these abnormally layouts result in an improved number of clicks, I wonder? Is it just us?
I imagine I've skipped over a ton of search results that are just like the one in the article for just that reason.
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.
In a even broader scope, Jakob Nielsen has shared lots of data from his eye tracking usability studies that show just how little attention users pay to online content [1][2].
[1] http://www.nngroup.com/topic/advertising/
[2] http://www.nngroup.com/topic/eyetracking/all/
Dear Google, thanks for trying to address content skimmers - but now we may have another problem...
My first thought when seeing the photo was ok, this is a guy giving his opinion on the topic, I'm not interested in opinion, I want the facts. Can companies act like an author on G+ ?
And it's too bad they don't accept company logos, I think that would really help. It downplays company we pages versus articles.
:
- "Most people were clicking the #2 result." Huh?!? How do you possibly know that people are clicking the 2nd result? You don't. Unless you have access to Wikipedia's analytics, you have NO WAY in knowing. So what you're saying could be true--but could not be true. It's your interpretation, not fact.
- I'm seeing paid ads for "macro recorder", thus you're the first after the paid ads. "macro record" is a bad example of this. A true test would be to unverify for at least a week and see if you have more or less clicks. That is if you end up staying the #1 result. I bet that your rankings would change if you un-verified your site's authorship.
- I still see no proof that your traffic went down based on Google Authorship (your photo appearing). So, what you're saying is that you had 90 percent more traffic before you verified authorship? Putting your photo there caused a loss in traffic? I'm not seeing enough proof of that (you're not showing any analytics data).
He also mentioned that, "Bounce rate dropped while time-on-site and page views increased. It's as if having an authoritative photo in the search results raised users' trust in my site and expectations of authority."
I don't see this as an indictment of Google Authorship at all; rather this is an example of a situation where user intention is misaligned with what a webmaster is showing. If I'm looking for content (particularly the originator of said content), having the author's name and face is exactly what I'm looking for. When you're searching for car parts or baby strollers or software, that same name/face is going to throw you off.
His authorship link makes it look like a review of some macro recorder software. I would actually consider an authorship link that's being triggered by a product page a bug that needs to be corrected ASAP.
EDIT: Strangely enough his authorship image is still triggered by a search for "macro-recorder". Did he reactivate it?
Now imagine if Google allowed him to tag his page with a "Software Download" tag.. and enabled him to attach a appstore like icon next to the search result instead of his face. Would that drive more clicks?
Blog post search results are also more likely to field multiple results with authorship pictures.
Still, worrisome if it's the only top ranked result with a photo. I imagine this will fade over time as people get used to it, took me a few months to figure out what was going on, as a user.
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.
Having said that, we're all in the tech field and this guy's product seems to be geared towards the tech field. Perhaps the result for the population-at-large is different?
I've developed a rejection to faces in websites. But honestly I didn't expect this to be common. Much the opposite.
A coworker runs one of those aggregate-amazon-affiliate-link sites (think http://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/) for camping and outdoorsy things. He saw a noticeable increase in traffic by associating his wife's picture in his search results. He's of the opinion that a pretty face helps sell things.
It's a little extra money in his pocket, but not something profitable or rewarding enough to do full time. (He also has a few other attempts that don't do as well as the camping one, and with the camping one the income is pretty seasonal).
If I search for "digital camera" and see results from friends that are heavily into digital cameras I will likely consider that result.
If I search for "video editing software" or "ramen recipes" or "pizza in sf" I would love to see which things my friends are recommending more than I would like to see what is highest ranked by some algorithm.
There's the "crap at the top" that is almost never what I'm looking for, and then there's the real results, which is what I scan for.
Also, searching for dev advice is not the same as searching for a product like in OP's case.
As a few others here have pointed out, slapping Google Authorship markup all over your site is probably not a good idea unless you run a pure news / blog style site.
One other point to note though as well is that I am very familiar with that message in GWT telling you that traffic dropped by a crazy percentage overnight. Given everything going on in the SEO space at the moment, I am not entirely convinced just yet that you don't have a case of correlation rather than causation at the moment.
His intuition makes sense, and his conclusions are probably correct in this specific case, but this is shoddy analysis and shouldn't be presented in a generalized manner as he's done here.
1. Hey we support all open protocols all you need to do is use our FREE service that is superior to all others.
2. OK now you need to unify your profile with Google+
3. Either kill the product entirely or drop the open standard support because the open standard does not support some awesome feature they made.
4.You are stuck in a proprietary world
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.
Maybe a little nit picky but that's a bit of an assumption especially in the context of the article.
I guess it shows the importance of having more diverse results, you want other results appearing that strongly link to you positively (our official twitter/fb/software reviews for example)
That being said, I've been noticing that results returned in Google, even for technical posts (eg, Emacs howtos) have more and more been including headshots from the writer. It's the same posts I would have trusted before, it just seems weird to actually have a face to go along with the post.
And when I think about it, that's the whole issue: I'm beginning to think that images (of authors or webmasters or product logos) don't belong on the serarch results page--ever. I can't see a case where it helps the average person who is searching because the photo is always once removed from the actual content.
If I search for a "thingamabob" how does the photo of somebody who wrote about thingamabob help me choose a result? If I'm searching for a company, even the company logo doesn't help because I may not know it ahead of time. Or if I'm looking for a blog, how would I know the face of the blogger ahead of time? I just can't see that many searches where the author's face is relevant to choosing the content you want to see.
Then there is the issue of Google putting the photo in the hottest part of the user's heat-map eye-scan of the search results page. If you put an irrelevant item where the user is looking for immediate relevancy, that result will get skipped (just as the OP postulated and so many commenters are confirming here on HN).
Finally, you have to wonder what Google was really thinking. If images do have an impact on click-through rate, then the images will get SEO'd and become useless. There is a comment on this thread that confirms that putting a woman's picture for the authorhip increased hits. Great, soon every website will appear to be written by a hot babe showing skin (or hot guy depending on the target audience), or if logos are allowed, all competitors will have a logo that looks like the #1 in the field.
Google is killing the golden goose.