Google+ has been around since its launch in 2011, reaching over 50 million users within 3 months, a scale much greater than its social network rivals Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. By the end of its first year it has reached a staggering 90 million users (Source: Wikipedia). The odd thing is if you ask your friends and colleagues which social network sites they use, they probably forget to mention Google+, as many have an account, but are yet to recognise its potential. In 2014 it seems this is about to change.
In recent months, Google+ has become a frequent topic of discussion between online marketing specialists and in particular SEO specialists. With a social network site holding this much power at a time when social media marketing has become an essential ingredient to SEO success and sustainability, surely Google+ uptake must effect SEO rankings?
Google+ works on a similar basis to Facebook’s ‘likes’ with its own +1 facility. The +1 button allows users to recommend websites and content and this is where the discussion begins. Search engines, with particular focus on Google have always sought to identify a website’s authority online to help determine where it should rank within their SERPs. Traditionally, they would look at backlinks (inbound links from other websites) to measure a website’s popularity and authority online. This is still a widely used technique, but with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, the quality and validity of backlinks has seen a great deal of websites lose authority due to having ‘bad links’ over the last 12 months.
With the popularity of social networking websites, the engines now have another means of gathering valuable insight into a website’s online authority. Individuals and businesses alike can build authority gathering valuable ‘likes’ and ‘+1’ for their websites and content. Google+ +1’s currently hold greater weight with Google’s SERPs over Facebook and Twitter, as they are able to access Google+’s data.
Google has also given the way they display their SERPs a makeover, introducing a number of new formats focused on content including content from Google+ pages and posts to provide users with the most closely matched results to their search query, now dominating many of the top spots. Google+ pages tend to get crawled and indexed at a much faster rate too and of course websites with a higher PageRank will rank higher in search results too.
Whilst traditional on-page SEO techniques provide a solid foundation for websites to rank well for relevant query based clusters of key phrases; social networking sites are fast becoming a must in terms of demonstrating online authority to aid long term SEO visibility and provide a platform to share relevant and topical content and seek engagement from like minded industry authorities and potential customers.
It is clear to see that 2014 will see further growth of social content within SERPs and is certainly something from an SEO perspective that just cannot be overlooked.