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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,

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 for the decline in traffic to his site. The headline is definitely overstating things; the article itself concludes "Turns out, it's not that simple. Some pages moved down, but some have improved drastically." And on the graph he shows, the worst CTR decrease is -57% while the best CTR increase is 329%. So I think the headline of this article ("How Google Authorship decreased our traffic by 90%") remains inaccurate.

mattmanser 13y ago
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!
- jitbit 13y ago
  >>he doesn't seem to show the actual results for the page he was talking about (post author here) I did post the screenshot of the results page, it includes my page, not hiding anything
  - mattmanser 13y ago
    You might miss this now as it's late, but the screen shot of your traffic results doesn't include the page '/macro-recorder' in the section titled 'It's not that simple'. That's the page you were talking about in the paragraphs above in the article, that's the page that's still number 1 in google when I search and still has your screenshot next to it when I search for 'macro recorder'. It's the crux of your argument and it's completely missing, it's the only relevant page, everything else is almost completely irrelevant. I'm not at all disbelieving you, but I'm also honestly saying you don't really seem to understand the scientific method if you think what you published is good enough to support what you've claimed. It's a half finished investigation, the facts are completely inconclusive. And that's what undermines a lot of SEO experts opinion still today. Speculation without fact. Your post at the moment is plausible but without the most important serious fact. What traffic were you getting before the picture appeared for that one page, and what traffic were you getting after the picture was added. Can you confirm that you didn't change the meta description or title at all? Everything else is a distraction to the most basic scientific method and that is what makes the article bad, you've conflated a bunch of different 'symptoms' with one hypothesis.
Matt_Cutts 13y ago
Just to follow up on this: I did check with the team, and the message that Jitbit received ("Search results clicks for http://www.jitbit.com/xxxxxxxx/ http://www.jitbit.com/xxxxxxxx/ have decreased significantly") pertains to the amount of clicks per day, not clickthrough. In other words, the message that Jitbit received--and that sparked this article--meant that Jitbit was getting less overall traffic from Google, not that clickthroughs had gone down. That's consistent with the site being affected by Penguin as well.

mattmanser 13y ago

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!

jitbit 13y ago
>>he doesn't seem to show the actual results for the page he was talking about (post author here) I did post the screenshot of the results page, it includes my page, not hiding anything
- mattmanser 13y ago
  You might miss this now as it's late, but the screen shot of your traffic results doesn't include the page '/macro-recorder' in the section titled 'It's not that simple'. That's the page you were talking about in the paragraphs above in the article, that's the page that's still number 1 in google when I search and still has your screenshot next to it when I search for 'macro recorder'. It's the crux of your argument and it's completely missing, it's the only relevant page, everything else is almost completely irrelevant. I'm not at all disbelieving you, but I'm also honestly saying you don't really seem to understand the scientific method if you think what you published is good enough to support what you've claimed. It's a half finished investigation, the facts are completely inconclusive. And that's what undermines a lot of SEO experts opinion still today. Speculation without fact. Your post at the moment is plausible but without the most important serious fact. What traffic were you getting before the picture appeared for that one page, and what traffic were you getting after the picture was added. Can you confirm that you didn't change the meta description or title at all? Everything else is a distraction to the most basic scientific method and that is what makes the article bad, you've conflated a bunch of different 'symptoms' with one hypothesis.

Matt_Cutts 13y ago

Just to follow up on this: I did check with the team, and the message that Jitbit received ("Search results clicks for http://www.jitbit.com/xxxxxxxx/ http://www.jitbit.com/xxxxxxxx/ have decreased significantly") pertains to the amount of clicks per day, not clickthrough. In other words, the message that Jitbit received--and that sparked this article--meant that Jitbit was getting less overall traffic from Google, not that clickthroughs had gone down. That's consistent with the site being affected by Penguin as well.