Don’t Get Cute With Rel=Author Tags

I finally got around to implementing rel=”author” tags on my blog.  It’s pretty easy to do by linking your Google + profile to your site – Instructions here – and the benefit, at least for me, was pretty immediate.  

Just by attaching my mug to my URLs in Google’s SERPs, my organic traffic increased 15% immediately.  While I didn’t do any serious rank tracking, my best guess is that my rankings didn’t change much, but rather the CTR on my ranking URLs went up – because who wouldn’t want to click on this?

Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I had to test it out right? So what makes the Web go round? Cute cat pics right?

Within a minute or two my SERPs looked like this:

Pretty cool right? Not really. Check out what happened to my organic traffic:

The moral of the story: Cats are for social media consultants.