SHOULD GOOGLE AUTHORSHIP BE USED ON EVERY PAGE OF A WEBSITE?

Google Authorship is a way to connect authors with the informational articles (blog posts) that they write. It tells Google who the original author of the content is and links content written on your owned domain to your individual (not company) Google + profile. Content that is written by an author that has verified authorship through Google appears in the search results with their headshot and searchers can click on the byline to see more articles they’ve authored or follow them on Google+. Once authorship is verified, content appears in the search results like this:

It’s very simple to sign up for authorship. Here’s more information.

Since content attached to an author appears nicely on the search results page and the image and byline convey authority and may increase click through rate it’s natural to wonder: “Should I add code to every page of my site so that they all include authorship?” Even though we do see this happen, according to Google it’s discouraged. Here’s what Google had to say on the issue in a Google Webmaster Central Blog post titled “rel=”author” frequently asked (advanced) questions”:

Q: What kind of pages can be used with authorship?

A: Good question! You can increase the likelihood that we show authorship for your site by only using authorship markup on pages that meet these criteria:
• The URL/page contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or single piece of content, by the same author. This means that the page isn’t a list of articles or an updating feed. If the author frequently switches on the page, then the annotation is no longer helpful to searchers and is less likely to be featured.
• The URL/page consists primarily of content written by the author.
• Showing a clear byline on the page, stating the author wrote the article and using the same name as used on their Google+ profile.

Q: Can I use authorship on my site’s property listings or product pages since one of my employees has customized the description?

A: Authorship annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real person’s perspective or analysis on a topic. Since property listings and product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using authorship in these cases. However, an article about products that provides helpful commentary, such as, “Camera X vs. Camera Y: Faceoff in the Arizona Desert” could have authorship.

While Google doesn’t outright state it here, we can put 2 and 2 together and surmise that Google Authorship should only be used on blog posts- content that is authored by one person and includes their insights/opinions on a specific topic. Google Authorship should not be used on any other page of the site including the homepage, interior product or service pages, about pages, etc.

When it comes to Google it’s always important to “play nice” and err on the side of caution. Google clearly states how they want Authorship to be used. There’s no reason to jeopardize the likelihood that Google will show authorship on your site.

Publisher: Scriptable Solutions
Source: http://www.scriptablesolutions.com/article.cfm?ArticleNumber=133

ONLINE AD REVENUES BLOW PAST BROADCAST TV, THANKS TO MOBILE

Perhaps the iconic pose of our era is someone squinting at a smartphone screen–replacing another iconic pose, the couch potato pointing a remote at the TV screen.

That stark change is apparent in a new report that says for the first time, Internet ad revenues have passed those of broadcast TV. Not all of TV, mind you. While online ad sales, which rose 17% to hit $42.8 billion last year, according to the report from the industry group Interactive Advertising Bureau, had already passed cable TV, broadcast and cable combined still dwarf online ads at $66 billion.

Still, the report marks a milestone, reflecting the fact that people are spending ever more time online–especially on their phones. Less than two years ago, it seemed as if the arrival of the smartphone as a primary means to access communications and entertainment was going to destroy or at least cap the growth of online giants such as Google GOOG -0.12% and Facebook. Now, after years of predictions that the year of mobile advertising was at hand, they’ve finally come true.



Mobile advertising revenues jumped 110%, to $7.1 billion, according to the IAB report, prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers . That’s the third year of triple-digit growth for the category, which includes multiple formats such as display, search, and so-called native ads. “Our survey confirms that we are fully in transition to the post-desktop era,” PwC partner David Silverman said in the release. “Triple digit advertising revenue growth from mobile devices contrasted the more tepid 8 percent growth from traditional computer screens.”

Digital video ads on Google’s YouTube and elsewhere also continue to grow, though at a 19% rise, not quite as fast as in recent years. Online video ad revenues, at $2.8 billion, hit 7% of the total to become the fourth-largest category, just behind mobile ads, now at 17%.

 

Search ads, dominated by Google, remain the top category at $18.4 billion, while display ads reached $7.9 billion. But both are growing much more slowly than mobile and digital video ads–search at 8.6% and display at 7%.

As television networks slowly move their shows online and people view them on multiple screens, the lines between online and TV ads may blur, making the distinction less meaningful. Indeed, one of the key focuses of advertisers today is how best to advertise across screens.

A new study by Google, for instance, indicates that people search a lot for shows online, even months before a new show premieres or a new season starts, and try to catch up on shows online an average of two months before a new season begins. What’s more, searches continue at a relatively high level for weeks after a premiere or new season starts. That suggests that networks and studios will have to find ways to better coordinate ad campaigns in different media.

Publisher: Scriptable Solutions
Source: http://www.scriptablesolutions.com/article.cfm?ArticleNumber=132

COULD DISAPPEARING AUTHOR PHOTOS IN GOOGLE SERPS SIGNAL COMING AUTHOR RANK?

When John Mueller announced Google was “simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count,” he asserted that this change was simply an effort to de-clutter the search engine results page (SERP). Prominent Internet marketers, however, had their own theories on Google’s latest bold move.

Here we evaluate some of the theories posed by industry thought leaders about why Google has cut author photos from SERPs. We also explore how the removal of author photos from SERPs may actually portend Google’s intent to add author reputation as an algorithmic ranking factor.

Background on Google Authorship and Author Rank

First, a refresher on the Google Authorship program and when to apply authorship code to a web page.

The only place authorship markup should appear is on pages that offer educational, unique or otherwise useful information, created by a true author. Authorship markup should not appear on product pages, for example. Think of a magazine — bylines don’t belong on advertisements; they belong on articles. Google has historically used authorship markup to create a special display, or rich snippet, in its search results that may include an author’s name and head shot.

For more on what Google authorship markup is and how to correctly implement it on a website, read Claiming Your Authorship on the Web.

It’s also necessary to understand how Google may now or eventually use an individual author’s reputation as a ranking signal. Author Rank is industry jargon for an algorithm that gauges the authority of an author so that higher rankings can be given to content written by more authoritative authors. This concept is called “Agent Rank” in one Google patent for a system that quantifies author authority.

Google confirmed that author authority was a ranking signal within In-Depth Articles results. It’s not known if author reputation is used as a ranking signal in other contexts, but there has been indication from Google reps that the search engine would like to use author authority in appropriate contexts if it can be trusted as a clean signal — that is, if the ranking factor can’t be easily spammed.

Abuse of Authorship Markup

Since Google authorship photos debuted in 2011, there have been many reports of increased click-through rates (CTR). A Catalyst Search Marketing case study, for example, found SERP results with author photos saw a 150% CTR increase.

History has shown that known ranking signals become targets of spam and abuse. Ecommerce sites have inappropriately implemented authorship markup on product pages that don’t qualify as “authored” content.

In December 2013, Matt Cutts announced a change that would reduce the appearance of authorship photos in SERPs by 15 percent. This was likely motivated by Google’s interest in cleaning up the signal, weeding out unauthoritative and inappropriate authorship markup. Some have theorized that the latest removal of author photos altogether can also be viewed as a move by Google to stop abuse of authorship markup.

“Google has a vested interest in eliminating people who are using authorship markup just to get their picture in SERPs for an enhanced CTR — people who aren’t really authors or interested in writing true content,” said Bruce Clay, Inc. Senior SEO Analyst Rob Ramirez. “Now that Google has removed photos, i.e., the reward, we’ll see a cleaner SERP.”

In a nutshell, by removing the incentive to abuse authorship markup, Google may be moving closer to using author authority as a ranking factor.

Consider also how Google has experimented with including photos and bylines and a mix of not having one or the other. Google has been selective when including photos and bylines, not always including author bylines despite proper authorship markup implementation. Yet, since Google removed photos completely, we now see author bylines in SERPs consistently. That is, while author photos have been removed altogether, we can now trust that bylines will show up (where authorship markup is set up). Before, it was up to Google’s discretion whether a result would be enhanced with any author info.

Noted Google-authorship expert Mark Traphagen reported:

“Qualification for an authorship byline now is simply having correct markup. This was a bit of a surprise given Google’s move last December to differentiate and highlight authors with better quality content who publish on trusted sites. But in a Google Webmaster Central Hangout on June 25, 2014, John Mueller indicated that now as long as the two-way verification … could be correctly read by Google, a byline would likely be shown.”

With the return of bylines for all authors and the removal of authorship photos, it seems like Google is experimenting with authorship rich snippets as it moves toward an increased emphasis on authorship and a fully realized Author Rank.

Ramirez expects that moving forward, SEOs will continue to see changes within authorship:

“The next thing that we might see Google do is clean up those authors who aren’t really publishing content. How often someone publishes content might start to become a factor. If, for example, authorship is set up one time and it hasn’t budged since that date, that might indicate to Google that this ‘author’ is not, in fact, a real author. In such cases, the user might lose any kind of benefit of authorship. Now that they’ve gotten rid of the photo enhancement in the SERP, they have the problem of cleaning up the people that were spamming it before. That has to be a next step before they go to Author Rank.”

Did Google Remove Author Photos Because the Images Competed with Ads?

On the day of Mueller’s announcement, noted search industry speaker Rand Fishkin (of SEO tools company Moz) tweeted: “the compelling explanation for Google removing profile pics from search is that it distracted from ads, and cost advertisers clicks” and that he was “frustrated [by John Mueller] saying that it will not cost CTR. Either Google lied about the increase in CTR with photos, or they’re lying now.”

In his announcement regarding the removal of authorship photos, Mueller said experiments indicated that CTR would remain steady despite the change to the SERP. Fishkin was not alone in his disbelief; Larry Kim of search advertising software company WordStream tested the theory by turning to analytics data. By his analysis, the CTR of a WordStream ad targeting “negative keywords” gained a 44% increase after the removal of author photos.

“We tested this data rigorously, and the difference we observed is statistically significant with 99% confidence due to the high number of daily ad impressions (thousands) for this keyword,” Kim wrote. “It’s clear to us that based on this data, it’s not realistic to say the deletion of Google authorship photos has no impact on the CTR of other elements on the SERP.”

Even if the removal of authorship photos impacts CTR on ads, Ramirez doesn’t think ad revenue was Google’s main catalyst for this change.

“Things are rarely that black and white when it comes to Google’s motives. I don’t think that Google is hurting for money — they don’t need to make those kind of decisions,” Ramirez said.

Instead, Google’s motivation is most likely tied to improving results and encouraging a cleaner signal for author authority. In the following video, Ramirez shares more of his thoughts on the changes in Google authorship in an exclusive interview:

Publisher: Scriptable Solutions
Source: http://www.scriptablesolutions.com/article.cfm?ArticleNumber=127

Google Webmaster Soon To Include Javascript Debugging Tool

Google reported on their Webmaster Central Blog today that they will be launching a new tool in the next few days to help users better understand how Google renders their JavaScript-coded website.

This new tool is designed to let webmasters know whether or not Google is running into difficulties with crawling or indexing their website due to the way JavaScript has been implemented.

Google says they have been making improvements in the way JavaScript is viewed by Googlebot. Previously, Google was only looking at raw text elements and weren’t able to interpret what a browser would see when running JavaScript.

This means that Google wasn’t able to return valuable content rendered in JavaScript to searchers.

To correct this problem, Google has been improving the way they execute JavaScript:

We have been gradually improving how we do this for some time. In the past few months, our indexing system has been rendering a substantial number of web pages more like an average user’s browser with JavaScript turned on.

To help out site owners, Google offers the following solutions to potential issues that Googlebot runs into with JavaScript.

• If resources like JavaScript or CSS in separate files are blocked (say, with robots.txt) so that Googlebot can’t retrieve them, our indexing systems won’t be able to see your site like an average user. We recommend allowing Googlebot to retrieve JavaScript and CSS so that your content can be indexed better. This is especially important for mobile websites, where external resources like CSS and JavaScript help our algorithms understand that the pages are optimized for mobile.

• If your web server is unable to handle the volume of crawl requests for resources, it may have a negative impact on our capability to render your pages. If you’d like to ensure that your pages can be rendered by Google, make sure your servers are able to handle crawl requests for resources.

• It’s always a good idea to have your site degrade gracefully. This will help users enjoy your content even if their browser doesn’t have compatible JavaScript implementations. It will also help visitors with JavaScript disabled or off, as well as search engines that can’t execute JavaScript yet.

• Sometimes the JavaScript may be too complex or arcane for us to execute, in which case we can’t render the page fully and accurately.

• Some JavaScript removes content from the page rather than adding, which prevents us from indexing the content.

If you’re concerned that your site may be impacted by any of the above issues, look forward to Google’s JavaScript debugging tool to be launched in the “coming days.”

Publisher: Scriptable Solutions
Source: http://www.scriptablesolutions.com/article.cfm?ArticleNumber=100

Google is considering giving a Boost in its search-engine results to Websites...

A powerful voice at Google wants websites to be more secure.

In a move that experts say could make it harder to spy on Web users, Google is considering giving a boost in its search-engine results to websites that use encryption, the engineer in charge of fighting spam in search results hinted at a recent conference.

The executive, Matt Cutts, is well known in the search world as the liaison between Google's search team and website designers who track every tweak to the company's search algorithms.

Mr. Cutts has also spoken in private conversations about Google's interest in making the change, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person says Google's internal discussions about encryption are still at an early stage and any change wouldn't happen soon.

A Google spokesman said the company has nothing to announce at this time.

Encrypting data transmitted over the Internet adds a barrier between Web users and anyone that wants to snoop on their Internet activities or steal their information.

Google uses its search algorithm to encourage and discourage practices among Web developers. Sites known to have malicious software are penalized in the company's rankings, for instance, as are those that load very slowly. In total, the company has more than 200 "signals" that help it determine search rankings, most of which it doesn't discuss publicly.

If Google adds encryption to the list, websites would have a big incentive to adopt it more widely.

"This would be a wonderful thing," says Kevin Mahaffey, the chief technology officer at mobile-security company Lookout. He says encryption ensures that a user's data can't be seen by others as it moves across the Internet, that it can't be tampered with, and that it gets to the correct recipient.

Internet users were jolted this week by disclosures that a popular encryption scheme, known as OpenSSL, contained a bug that could allow hackers to steal personal information. Still, despite any vulnerabilities, experts say it is safer to encrypt data to keep it secure.

Danny Sullivan, founding editor of the Search Engine Land blog and host of the conference where Mr. Cutts voiced support for encryption, believes Google ultimately may not favor encrypted sites in its results.

"Rewarding sites for [encrypting pages] in the algorithm would be a huge step," says Mr. Sullivan. "It also possibly causes an immediate change by all the wrong sites," he says, referring to sites that focus more on gaming Google results than developing good content.

Google is among many Internet companies that have moved to encrypt more of their services in recent years, including Gmail and Google Search. It stepped up those efforts last year, moving to encrypt traffic between its data centers after revelations that the National Security Agency was exploiting vulnerabilities in Google's infrastructure.

More websites are encrypting their pages. Still, some encrypt only parts of their pages, which can leave users vulnerable to attacks, says Matthew Green, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. He says hackers can take advantage of such vulnerabilities by capturing "cookies," for instance. This can allow hackers to track where users are going to log into a website as someone else.

To highlight security vulnerabilities on the Web, Eric Butler, a software developer at Uber, in 2010 designed an extension for the Firefox Web browser called Firesheep that snooped on users logging into insecure websites, allowing the Firesheep user to impersonate that person at the push of a button. "All websites should be using [encryption] everywhere with no exceptions," Mr. Butler says.

Publisher: Scriptable Solutions
Source: http://www.scriptablesolutions.com/article.cfm?ArticleNumber=93