The Google+ button is now on 1 million sites and appears in 4 billion impressions every day, but that’s more to do with the fact that it’s Google than with the button being useful. So, who is actually using the Google+ button, are they in their millions, are they in fact real? Juan Vargas, SEO Director at Tug Search looks at the evidence…
The new social network, Google+ was introduced in July this year, and was billed as the Internet giant’s closest-yet answer to Facebook. It promised big things – “share recommendations with friends contacts and the rest of the web when your advice is most helpful. It’s easy to pick the circles of who’ll find it interesting and post to Google+.” Not my words but the words of the Google PR machine.
A few months earlier the +1 button was introduced by Google. There is a very intimate relationship between Google+ and the Google +1 button, and the success of the latter will be greatly determined by the adoption of the first.
So, now we’ve had a chance to get to grips with it, how is this all shaping up? Since the button was introduced, Google has made a number of significant updates to it and today the button is featured on millions of pages. It was announced in Wired.com recently that the +1 button will be used to determine the quality of a particular page.
However, the success of the Google+ button will be determined by the popularity of Google+ itself. Although the button has been widely adopted on the Internet, at the moment its use is limited to a niche community – mostly young males who are tech-oriented. So, how is Google going to make this much more mainstream? After all this is going to give Facebook a real run for its money. As it currently stands, I very much doubt it.
Now that the Google/Twitter alliance is off, Google +1 buttons will become one of the only ways the company will have to measure social interaction, as it now can only be established by quantitative signals rather than qualitative ones (number of Tweets against previous information about the authority of the Twitter account). Google is now providing stats for Google +1 interactions on Google Webmaster Tools, which means they might be seriously considering +1s as one of the ranking factors.
Recent reports show that the button is now on 1 million sites and appears in 4 billion impressions every day, but that’s more to do with the fact that it’s Google rather than with the button being useful. So, who is actually using the Google+ button, are they in their millions, are they in fact real?
Google will have to find a way to filter the real activity from the manipulated results. Some SEOs are now playing with the button, while some shady ones will try to exploit the benefits of +1ing – it is already rumoured that people are trading +1s.
The feature is changing, Google recently announced that the +1 button will let you share to your Circles on Google+, directly from whatever page you’re browsing. All good stuff but remember that its underlying purpose is to improve search results. We should not lose sight of this.
By Juan Vargas
SEO Director
Tug
www.tugsearch.co.uk
