Google Plus influences SEO:More Plus=Better ranks?
For those of you wondering what good Google Plus is when you have facebook, here’s the answer. Forget everything else, assume Google Plus sucks at social networking, but Google can influence your website’s search engine rankings significantly – that is the truth.
But how significantly? Can I just get away with it plugging the Google Plus button on all my pages?
Well, yes and no.
Yes because, if people Google Plus your article from your website (via the buttons that is), it influences as a positive factor to push that page up the search engine results page. But its not easy as you think.
It doesn’t work like, Plug the button > Get people to click it > Get better ranks – No!
Google Plus votes (let’s call all the clicks on the Google plus button as votes) works together with search engine data. If not, one can easily game the situation, right?
Already there are several services where you can buy Google Pluses in packages. But does these services help you other than showing off the numbers? I think no.
Because, from the webmasters data (social activity tool), we see that whenever a Google plus vote is cast on an article from your website, the following data is collected.
Search Impact Data from Google Plus
1. Referrer term: Original referring search term used to find the article from search engines (Google).
2. +1 Annotated impressions: The number of times a user saw/viewed that page(plus one’d page) in search results with a personalized (because someone in the user’s social connections already +1′d the page) or aggregated annotation.
3. +1 Annotated clicks: The number of times users clicked on a search result with a personalized annotation, because it was plus one’d.
4. All impressions v/s +1 Annotated impressions: The total number of times a user saw a page in search results, without a personalized annotation compared to with annotation.
5. All clicks v/s +1 Annotated clicks: The total number of times a user clicked on a page in search results with annotation compared to without annotation.
Google Plus Audience Data
The behavior of people who are plus one’ing pages from your website. There has to be a significant amount of people plus one’ing pages from your site to be able to get this data.
Which means that Google plus votes aren’t counted just by the clicks and numbers. Every single bit of data behind the vote/click is traced by Google and audited. Also, the data is tracked to see if the votes are bringing in recurring visitors – that is are users visiting the site because of a genuine google plus one vote? I assume the votes aggregate algorithmically when this happen.
Ideally, this is what should happen, for your website to be able to leverage on Google Plus votes for SEO.
- There should be a decent organic traffic to your website from Google.
- Users should be able to vote with Google Plus votes on these articles/pages.
- While the articles/pages show up as annotated results on search engine results pages, more visitors should follow it giving your site brownie points.
- This should be a static trend and not a one week process.
So, what should webmasters do to utilize Google Pluses influence on SEO?
Easy way out
Plug in Google plus buttons on all the pages and if possible prompt users to click on it. Although I agree that this is like shooting in the dark.
Hard way( the SEO way)
- Find out what are your top organic traffic generating pages on the site. (Analytics > Content > Filter by Non-Paid search)
- Use a referral detector plugin to detect search engine visitors to these pages and show them the Google plus button with a prompt.
Example: “Hello Google visitor, if you found this post interesting, please consider voting for it on Google Plus with the button below!”
- Stay away from buying Google Plus packages, as it will dilute your “real points”.
- May be this is a bit over the top, but I would suggest that you don’t show Google Plus buttons on other pages. But its up to you to decide.
Sidenote: Also, we’ve already seen that Facebook and Google don’t go together (facebook prefers bing) so we cannot be so sure about facebook likes influencing Google serps as the data is not available with google. But Google has its own “like” – which is the plus one button. Does that ring a bell?
This is a nicely detailed explanation of Google+ as it relates to Google SEO. I might add that it’s also VERY important to add the Google+ vote button to your main index page AND link back to your blog from your Google profile. I’ll leave it to you to explain the added benefit in doing so but this is straight from Google. From a SEO perspective, Google Plus is a very exciting and simple to use enhancement that every blogger should embrace.
Yep. You’re correct Mr.Brian.
smells like a monopoly attempt..
Yes, I see the new Google+ service websites popping on Flippa as well. They are useless crap except the owners who sell this crap serially to novice or excited people. Your way is the right way. Google+ can help if it is natural.
I hate to even broach this because it’s been done to death…So are you implying that a bunch of random strangers +1-ing an article will somehow affect the rankings I see…even though I’m in no way connected to those people who are +1-ing something?
Nope. I’m sure you didn’t read the article fully, or you missed the best part.
I’ve read this article fully… 3 times and I still can’t figure out what the author is trying to say. At the very VERY least, the article’s title is misleading…
The action items are questionable as well. Why make it so complicated? Why not just put the button on every page instead of parsing out traffic from search engines? Why add detection for search traffic? It doesn’t matter where the traffic is coming from.
I also don’t see how, to Google’s click-thru algos, adding the +1 layer gives them any additional relevant information. If people are clicking thru on a link, they are doing so regardless of the +1 in the snippet. A click-thru is a click-thru. Are we implying that a click-thru on a link with a +1 is some kind of “super click-thru”? Where’s the data to support that assumption?
Is this article really telling me that in order to benefit from the +1 there should be “decent organic traffic from Google to your site”? Isn’t that just more than a bit circular. I need traffic from Google to get traffic from Google? Ok. let me get right on that.
“While the articles/pages show up as annotated results on search engine results pages, more visitors should follow it giving your site brownie points. ” What does this even mean?
Hi Mani, It’s a shame someone would go through all that trouble, working up into a tizzy, leaving a lengthy comment yet be so ashamed of it they do so anonymously. Every question Ken is throwing at you is answered on Google’s blog, Google’s Webmaster blog, and the Webmaster forum. I guess it’s easier to attack the guy just trying to help others.
Brian, I appreciate your concern for my level of tizz. It was no trouble at all. I guess in this world of 140 characters, my reply must seem like a novel. Additionally, I’m sure we can all accept the irony of your being-anonymous comment when the entire article is anonymous.
I would disagree with your point that all my questions have been answered in the forums. The ones that are, I bring up because they suggest differently than what the author implies.
Asking questions of the author or asking where he or she is getting their information is not attacking. You put stuff on the internet and create a comments section, people are gonna ask questions when they don’t get what you’re saying. If I knew who the author was, I’d offer an apology if the intended tone didn’t translate (yes, i’m being sincere here).
Brian, I have included my website (admittedly not updated in a while) and twitter ID here. Once again, my apologies to the author if the tone came across wrong.
Thanks for this, I found it really interesting, and very informative. It’s a lot more then just getting a lot of clicks huh?
Interesting article regarding Google +. I must admit that I purchased a load of +1s the last few days in an attempt to try it out. New data to show how its working so far but I don’t expect the results to last for long. Still, got to try it to see how successful it could be!
My website had previously been as low as page 46 in Google search about a month after starting the website. Almost 500 +1′s later I now rank on page one. This is a website I built myself with the website builder included in my webhosting package through inmotion. There were no major changes to my site during this period.
Hi Hayden, my company is a photo and video company, were new to google plus. Im wondering how you were able to get +500, i would like to do the same thing for our site. thanks for your help.
Nice post thanks for the insight, Google + can be used as a marketing tool and there are SEO benefits via organic search, but if you add all this up Google + is just another social platform that has potential for various other add ons