Google To Stop Showing Authorship Information In Search Results by @mattsouthern

Last month we reported that Google would be removing Authorship pictures from search results. Now it has been confirmed by Google’s John Mueller that Authorship information will be removed from search results entirely.

The decision was made to drop Authorship information because the information was not found to be overly useful to searchers, and at times has even detracted from the search results.

Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.

While it’s unfortunate to see Authorship information going away, it really should not make a difference to site owners. Since Authorship didn’t help to increase traffic to pages, then site owners shouldn’t notice a decrease in traffic going forward.

Something Mueller notes that Google will continue to focus on is Schema.org structured markup: “This markup helps all search engines better understand the content and context of pages on the web, and we’ll continue to use it to show rich snippets in search results.”

Google first started implementing Authorship around the time as the launch of Google

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Google’s Search App Is Now Truly Multilingual

See Amit's Top 10Google Made 890 Search Improvements In Last Year#GoogleFailWhat Happens When Knowledge Graph Goes BadSubscribe to SearchCapSUBSCRIBENewsSEOSEMLocalRetailSearch EnginesSocialHomeMobileGoogle’s Search App Is Now Truly MultilingualUsers can select up to five languages for simultaneous recognition.Greg Sterling on August 21, 2014 at 4:29 pm More

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How to Build Your Own Free Amazon Organic Search Rank Tracker

August 19th, 2014 - Posted by Nathan Grimm to Analytics, Tools and E-Commerce

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Do you want a free tool that tracks your organic search rankings in Amazon? Yes? You're in luck.

I am going to show you how to build your own organic search rank tracking tool using Kimono Labs and Excel.

This is a follow-up to my last post about how to rank well in Amazon, which covered the basic inputs to Amazon's ranking algorithm. It received a lot of comments about my rank-tracking prototype in Google Docs; the Moz community is overflowing with smart people who immediately saw the need for a tool to track their progress. As luck would have it, something in Google Sheets broke the day after I published, so I had to replicate the rank tracking tool in Excel using the SEOTools for Excel plugin. The Excel tool is a low-setup way to record your progress, but if you want to track more than a few terms, it is very laborious. I've since built a more (but not completely) automated, scalable way to track rankings using Kimono Labs to scrape the data and Excel to run the reports.

(Shout out to Benjamin Spiegel for turning me on to Kimono Labs through an excellent Moz post.)

Pros and cons of rank tracking

The death of Google rank tracking has been widely reported, so I feel compelled to review why Amazon rank tracking is both useful and a terrible KPI.

Amazon rank tracking is great because

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Conversational Search Comes To Bing by @mattsouthern

Bing recently announced they are now offer conversational search, and it works very much the same way as Google’s conversational search. You can ask a natural language question, and then follow up with another question about the same subject and Bing will remember what you were asking about.

Here’s an example of me testing out Bing’s new search functions by asking it questions about Google.

First question: “who are the founders of Google?”

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