Last week the SEO world was rocked when Google announced its plan to remove the author photos from search results. In the past adding authorship and the image in search results had proven to increase the number of clicks exponentially. The question remains, why did Google choose to implement this change that had only been in place a short while?
If you had an author pic associated with your Google links, then you had a distinct advantage. Having a picture associated with an article automatically conveys a certain sense of authority. Not only did this get you a boost in search ranks, but it also got you more clicks than people who didn't have author pics for their links.
Without these pics, marketers and developers may quickly find their hit counts going down. For people who rely on Adsense or other sorts of monetization, this could be devastating. So what do you do if you've lost your author pic in Google searches and know that it's adversely affecting you? You're going to have find other ways to focus your SEO efforts.
This whole thing demonstrates exactly how volatile the rules of Google are. Marketers have to always be on their toes if they want to get ahead in the search engine results, and this just throws another wrench into the works... kinda like how it did when Google originally introduced the pics to begin with a couple of years ago. It's not certain quite yet why Google is choosing to do this, but it ultimately doesn't matter. As people who rely on Google to bring us visitors and customers, we have to play by their rules or risk losing our entire business.
Regardless of the reasoning behind the change, the fact remains that one well kept SEO secret is now a thing of the past forcing marketers to find traffic elsewhere.
The official reason given me the internet giant was that the change was simply due to their new policy dubbed 'Mobile First'. The vision behind this new thought process comes from the belief that mobile users will surpass desktop users this year, and the companies aim is to create one unified site that caters to all platforms. That, coupled with a recent study that showed users preferred no images in their searches was the stated reason.
If you had an author pic associated with your Google links, then you had a distinct advantage. Having a picture associated with an article automatically conveys a certain sense of authority. Not only did this get you a boost in search ranks, but it also got you more clicks than people who didn't have author pics for their links.
Without these pics, marketers and developers may quickly find their hit counts going down. For people who rely on Adsense or other sorts of monetization, this could be devastating. So what do you do if you've lost your author pic in Google searches and know that it's adversely affecting you? You're going to have find other ways to focus your SEO efforts.
This whole thing demonstrates exactly how volatile the rules of Google are. Marketers have to always be on their toes if they want to get ahead in the search engine results, and this just throws another wrench into the works... kinda like how it did when Google originally introduced the pics to begin with a couple of years ago. It's not certain quite yet why Google is choosing to do this, but it ultimately doesn't matter. As people who rely on Google to bring us visitors and customers, we have to play by their rules or risk losing our entire business.
Regardless of the reasoning behind the change, the fact remains that one well kept SEO secret is now a thing of the past forcing marketers to find traffic elsewhere.
The official reason given me the internet giant was that the change was simply due to their new policy dubbed 'Mobile First'. The vision behind this new thought process comes from the belief that mobile users will surpass desktop users this year, and the companies aim is to create one unified site that caters to all platforms. That, coupled with a recent study that showed users preferred no images in their searches was the stated reason.
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Keyword Advantage is a news review site that reveals the truths & myths by providing a Keyword Advantage Review.
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