6 ms·
It seems to me that Google's motivation for starting author snippets in search was to drive more people to sign up for Google Plus. Now that they've discovered
by Kortaggio 12y ago
It seems to me that Google's motivation for starting author snippets in search was to drive more people to sign up for Google Plus. Now that they've discovered it's either (1) not working, or (2) enough people have already signed up for G+, it makes sense to keep search uncluttered from the UX standpoint. You can see this steady move away from authorship snippets starting from when they first removed profile pictures.[1]
[1] https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j
- graeme 12y agoCertainly got me using it, a bit. I started adding everyone I knew to circles, in the hope that it might improve my author rank marginally. I likewise made sure to connect buffer to google+ and not neglect that platform for business social media posts.
- themodelplumber 12y agoMe too. I did everything required to get my authorship to show up. Now that it's gone, it's kind of frustrating to have put in the effort. Just like it's frustrating to have no less than seven different g+ public interfaces, between my work account, business page, newer personal gmail account, older personal gmail account, account being used by my wife and myself, and these weird alternate Youtube versions of two or three of the above. I called a client today to discuss them signing up for webmaster tools. The most frustrating part of the conversation was a discussion about dealing with the other Google "stuff" that comes with the new Google account they'll be making. Do they want to use the new email address for anything? What if it accidentally gets out? Etc.
- graeme 12y agoThat was the strangest part for me. Google+ forced an odd hybrid between my personal and business activities, but it wasn't absolute. I couldn't tell you how many google interfaces I have right now, I'd have to count them and go through a few while logged in to make sure it was complete. It wasn't that much work, but I suspect they could have improved their user testing on how multiple identities worked. Maybe they were just targeting the median user, but that is likely a mistake if you miss all the evangelists.
- aiiane 12y agoNote that you can sign up for a Google account without signing up for GMail. Just click the "I prefer to use my current email address" link underneath the username box in the signup flow.
- joelrunyon 12y agoOr 3) It's working so well that people are gravitating towards it rather than clicking on paid links (most probable reasoning).
- alanfalcon 12y agoNot very charitable to either dismiss as a lie this section of the post[1] or else to comment without having read the short post at all. [1] (If you’re curious -- in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.)
- joelrunyon 12y agoI'm curious what their metric was for "user experience." I did read that portion - but anyone who's done any work in search for very long knows that's google's response to most thing (the recent removal of exact match in ppc is meant to make the platform more accessible, but really just increases impressions / clicks by default and removes the fine tuning that you could do on an advanced level).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Donzo 12y agoMaybe it's my ugly mug or the particular type of content that I serve, but having authorship markup drove my traffic down 1/3rd. I'm happy to see it go.
- fmavituna 12y agoCan't you just disable it? I thought it was opt-in.
- blueskin_ 12y agoGoogle's love of metro-ifying everything and removing useful features clashes with google's love of foisting google+ onto unwilling users. Civil war, anyone?