[flaktrak]

Quite frankly Matt as someone who can't stand G+ I skip most mugg shot links as I have started assuming that it is going to be some crappy little G+ throw away post. So there is every chance that the person in question is getting less clicks due to the mugg shot.

Let's put all that aside what this situation is highlighting is just how terrible the webmaster tools data really is. I have clients that have not ranked for a keyword for over year yet webmaster tools is still telling them they are ranking. All this serves to do is confuse them. Which seems to be the point of what Google does these days.

You keep banging on about increased transparency but the fact is we don't need more badly made webmaster help videos. We need accurate stats and the promised accurate feedback as to what has gone wrong.

[tptacek]

Jitbit found out their SEOs were buying spam links on porn sites. They got hammered by Penguin 2. How exactly are we managing to connect those dots to G+ and webmaster tools?

[bad_user]

I have the opposite feeling, because I implemented authorship on my blog and for that authorship picture to happen the URLs have to have high ranking, otherwise they won't get shown. That's why I have come to associate authorship with popularity.

On my blog only the 6 most popular articles have authorship info in the search results, generating about 300 visits from organic search per day. And my blog is a highly technical blog that targets developers and I haven't seen any drops in traffic due to authorship.

Also, people here make the assumption that regular folks behave like us. They don't.

[cliqui]

According to wikipedia: "Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements".

To me there's not much organic left in google results, due to the filter bubble, tracking and lack of transparency on the ranking algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised to learn google boost ranking of results linked to google + accounts, which makes it self-promotion of their services and unnatural ranking.

Anyways I stay away from any result which doesn't look like a result I'm used to, so no click for those google sponsored results.