Hi everyone, hope you all had a great and productive week! This week, Google’s John Mueller announced that they are making some major changes in how the search results appear around authorship. If you recall, one of the “highlights” of the search listings with authorship was that it showed images and circle counts of the profile associated in Google+. “Mueller said that the click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.” While the pictures may disappear from the search results it appears that Google will simply feature the author’s name in light grey as shown in this example:
Creator features coming to YouTube
If you are a Youtube creator and have been quite successful with it, you should know that among the many new YouTube features they will soon launch is the so called “Fan Funding”.
Here´s an excerpt of the official announcement.
Fan Funding: Your fans aren’t just watching your videos, they’re also helping support your channel through services like KickStarter, IndieGogo, Patreon and more. We’ll be adding another option for you, where fans will be able to contribute money to support your channel at any time, for any reason. A handful of creators are testing this feature soon on desktop and Android, including Dulce Delight, Fitness Blender, The Healthcare Triage, The King of Random, Soul Pancake, Steve Spangler Science, The Young Turks, and Thug Notes. If you’re interested in trying it on your channel, sign up here.
8 Ways to Use Email Alerts to Boost SEO – Whiteboard Friday
And this week, Rand of Moz walks through some of the best link opportunities which can be discovered by setting up email alerts for various things that are published on the web. He runs through eight types of alerts that you can implement today for improved SEO. Cool!
Content Creation & Marketing/SEO and Search
- Blogging 101: Traffic Generation for Blogs on a Budget
- Competitive Analysis: The Most Valuable SEO Tactic You Ignore [Data]
- SEO 101, Part 3: Keyword Research Planning
- 4 Content Marketing Strategies You Might be Neglecting
Social/Small Business Bites
- Google is quietly testing a service for registering website domains
- How to Calculate the ROI of Your Social Media Campaigns
- How Facebook Fans Can Inform Your Content Marketing Strategies
- 7 Ways To Serve Your Customers On Social Media After The Sale
More from around the web …
- Marketing Day: Google+ A Referral Graveyard, Watchdog Targets YouTube, Facebook Page Engagement Up
- New Facebook Column Ads: This Week in Social Media
That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend!
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Somehow I find it difficult to believe that the click through rate would be about the same with no author images in search results, but I guess it all depends on a lot of factors.
I am not a big Google authorship promoter or fan, but it seems like pushed the thing like crazy since day one with the whole image in search results. Strange that they changed so suddenly.
Some folks have been saying that author images drew a users attention and focus too much. Google Ad click rates were dropping, and they don’t want that to happen, but who knows for sure.
Thanks for posting this DiTesco. I don’t keep up enough on these things, so it’s good to come across folks like yourself that keep up with the news.
Whiteboard Friday with Rand was a fantastic video. I need to watch it again, some great tips.
Great, just after I busted a gut to get my Google authorship working properly they change things so that I won’t show my mug any more. Typical 😀
Don’t know that anyone would pay to be my fan but there’s no harm in signing up to see what happens. I suppose YouTube will take their cut?
LOL Peter. I agree. Now no more pictures and sorry to hear about your mug shot 🙂
As for the fan funding, I must admit that I have not seen anything about YT taking a cut. I think they are doing to further “lure” creators into creating more and more videos. Traffic is all they need
Kaloyan Banev
I think that Google announce that about few months ago, but I was not sure that it is in power yet. Well, I can say that I don’t really see any major difference in CTR with or without image and authorship, quite the opposite of expected.