So doing an actual proper A/B split test is next to impossible due to a number of different factors but time and time again one of the quickest ways I have been able to boost SEO traffic to a site without doing a single thing to the rankings was to implement things like the authorship markup or other kinds of Microdata that triggers the rich snippets.
I totally take your point on board about finding the results looking like ads to you but from everything I have seen to date you would firmly be in the minority. Don't under estimate how "not informed" most people are. There is still a very very sizeable portion of users who can't distinguish things the other way around and think that the ads are organic results.
But if you are going for increasing traffic across the board and you don't specifically target some niche like say the HN crowd who find it weird or spammy, I would say Authorship and Rich Snippets are absolutely the way to go.
My only caveat is that I wouldn't be putting it across the whole site. Like JitBit have done with the stuff on their product pages. That might legitimately confuse some people in certain instances and it's really not what it was designed for in the first place. Blogs and news content though is perfect and as I said, works consistently well in all of my experiences and those of everyone else I know in the industry.
I'm sorry but that sounds like an appeal to authority to me. The original author is basing his article on solid figures (which, granted, he may be interpreting incorrectly) whereas you are making an argument based on your intuition.
Do you have any data at all that directly tests the effect of headshots on organic search results? Extrapolating from other rich metadata decoration is invalid. Small changes in design can lead to big differences in user behavior. That's why we A/B test in the first place.
Authority based on a large amount of actual experience is infinitely more useful than cherry-picking some random facts and ignoring several important details.
Appeals to authority are always deductively fallacious; even a legitimate authority speaking on his area of expertise may affirm a falsehood, so no testimony of any authority is guaranteed to be true.
> but time and time again one of the quickest ways I have been able to boost SEO traffic to a site
I'm curious what type of sites these were. I could imagine it working for a blog or a professional service, where the face behind the business counts. But for a business website, having an informal photo of a single person, an increase in CTR runs counter to my intuition.
BTW, when I searched "macro recorder", I did not see the G+ profile picture next to the search listing. Is this something that Google is rolling out piecemeal, or does it only display for his personalized search results?
It seems to me your take on the matter follows the myth that more traffic is better. IMHO this is deeply flawed, focusing on quantity, as in increase traffic, and missing the part where you qualify traffic.
Less traffic but of better quality is an actual improvement, more traffic of unknown quality could be an improvement or not, maybe those additional people are bouncing.
What is a certainty though is that your web server consume more resources and bandwidth due to traffic increase, and now you may have to refactor and optimize or pay to upgrade your hardware/hosting.
Those different factors can be controlled for. Interrupted time series analysis is done on things far more complex than "How many hits did a page get" every day.
I totally take your point on board about finding the results looking like ads to you but from everything I have seen to date you would firmly be in the minority. Don't under estimate how "not informed" most people are. There is still a very very sizeable portion of users who can't distinguish things the other way around and think that the ads are organic results.
But if you are going for increasing traffic across the board and you don't specifically target some niche like say the HN crowd who find it weird or spammy, I would say Authorship and Rich Snippets are absolutely the way to go.
My only caveat is that I wouldn't be putting it across the whole site. Like JitBit have done with the stuff on their product pages. That might legitimately confuse some people in certain instances and it's really not what it was designed for in the first place. Blogs and news content though is perfect and as I said, works consistently well in all of my experiences and those of everyone else I know in the industry.