Google+ and Search Results

Google+ has been released for a little over three weeks now and it’s on fire! 

Google+ is critical to the company’s plan to re-invent itself as a connector for people, the social web, as well as information, the search web.  It now has reportedly over 20 million members, even with its limited release. 

The big attractions so far are:

Hangouts – Live Video Conferencing

Circles – Organize your followers; better sharing control

Sparks – Content delivered to your stream for your interest

But What About Search

Google+ adds content to it’s search inventory a couple of ways.  First, your Google+ profile is public and searchable…unless you turn it off.  That means people can find your Google+ account in the Google search engine.  Could be pretty cool, depending on your preferences. 

Currently Google searchable profiles are limited to individuals.  The company seems to be struggling with how and when to introduce business profiles.  It seems to have been caught off guard by the demand for business profiles and is scrambling to deliver a solution.   Until they figure it out, FaceBook still holds a major advantage with it’s business pages and associated ad revenue.

You can hide your profile from Google Search, if you want, in 4 clicks, as follows:

 

Google+1 and Page Rank

Google has announced it’s updating the search algorithm to include Google+1 votes. 

In an earlier post, I mentioned that +1 votes will improve your search rankings.  This is the power of Google on display…merging the search web and the social web.  The goal is to merge people connections with information connections at one spot, Google.com.

So, be sure to add the  button to your web site, pages and posts.  You’ll get some benefit from this as time goes on.  And remember, that the search results you , as well as web sites and posts, are added to your +1 tab on your Google profile.  Google undoubtedly will, if it does not already, use this data to bolster an influence ranking for individuals as well as web sites.

Adding  To Your Site

If you have a WordPress site, I recommend the Really Simple Share plug in to add the +1 button.  If not, here’s the link to the code Google publishes that needs to be added to your site, posts, and pages.

Here’s a pretty good, quick video on some of the Google+ venues and SEO potential.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

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