Tag Archives for " Google "

9 years ago

Google Announces They Dropped Rich Snippet Author Images From SERPS

Google Announces They Dropped Rich Snippet Author Images from SERPS 

If you go to the Google Structured Data Testing Tool and add your sites, you will still see a preview of your profile photo but in the search pages we will no longer see our photos pop up. 

Google also dropped our circle counts. This is not just for real estate agents but for every search except we have seen some news media sources still having their logo showing up. 

Google authorship images no longer appear

John Mueller from Google said they did some “experimenting” and “discovered” there was no difference in CTR. Hmmm, that is not what they said before:). Even in the webmasters tools section Google was promoting everyone to do their authorships stating that you would get better CTR. 

Well, of course, you are going to get more clicks on search results with visual images than just text entries. Google is saying that this is being done to make the mobile search experience appear smoother. But then they have said things before that were not really true, so who knows! 

The chatter in the SEO forums and Google + communities is that all of our author images were distracting people from clicking on the ads, the pay per click ads. Some say big brands are complaining their CTR is dropping because searchers are clicking on images of people in organic listings. That does make a lot of sense although it is speculation. 

Whatever their real reasoning is, it is what it is. 

One more reason to understand that internet marketing is constantly changing and we should not ever rely on any one source for all your traffic, clicks or contacts. 

10 years ago

Google Did Not Turn Over Your Access Of Your Information to the United States Government

Google's CEO- Larry Page and David Drummond the Chief Legal Officer at Google came out with their official statement regarding the latest requests by the United States Government and the rumors of PRISM. 

The rumor is that Google gave the U.S. Government access to their servers through a secret program run by the National Security Agency called PRISM. U.S government requests for information from google

Google's official position is that they have NOT joined any secret program and have not joined any government program of any country that would give those governments secret access to their servers. Google is not giving anyone information about their users' internet activity. 

Google is very adamant about making sure that EACH and EVERY request by any government fulfills the law in which that request is based. Google has a full legal team that reviews every single request by any government that requires them to turn over information. If the request does not fall within the law- it is not granted. 

Verizon received an order to turn over millions of user records and data by the U.S. government. This of course, creates a lot of other press articles about other companies, Google included. 

Google stands by their position that there needs to be transparency in any requests made for their users' internet activity or records of any kind. That is why they have their Transparency Report page.  Google is the first company to create such a page. 

You can see by this chart that there is a continuous increase of requests for information about our internet activity which is very worrisome as to the errosion of personal liberties and the danger of subverting the freedom of expression. 

“But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.” Larry Page

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