Stick Google Plus Buttons on your Pages or Your Search Traffic Dies

The day Google launched the Plus One ( +1) buttons, I was having a meeting with our SEO team at [x]cube and I said Plus One is definitely going to be a factor in search results very soon. Whether you are a blog or a website, there needs to be a way for you to integrate Plus One button and entice your users to plus one for you. I had similar discussion with few of my other SEO friends too and not many of them agreed to the fact. One of the few reasons I received against the point was that it is too obvious, this could not be applicable for all types of sites because corporate websites are not likely to get Plus Ones compared to blogs and that Google would probably not like to get into another controversy of pushing their own product based on their search dominance.

While most of the reasons look good, the reason I believed in Plus One being eventually used as a search signal are:

  1. The way search technology has been improving the only way to stay abreast for Google is to involve human intelligence and Plus One buttons are an excellent way of crowd sourcing human intelligence to judge the quality of search results and websites.

  2. Facebook has already married Bing and is not likely to share any data with Google
  3. Google is done courting Twitter and now they don’t have access to the hose. Even when they had it, they didn’t seem to be going much beyond displaying real time results for certain results and displaying pictures of friends who have tweeted them
  4. Plus Ones can easily be tracked back to a user’s Google profile which contains a lot of personalized data. While collecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is not something that Google or for that matter, any company would not admit to, Plus One actually provides the scope for the same and it is indeed a treasure trove for any search engine to serve personalized results and also to leverage the social connections of the users ( crowd sourced human intelligence from people with a strong understanding of the user’s personal taste)

Now, why am I saying this again today? It seems Google actually admitted to be using Plus Ones as a signal for ranking websites in their search results in one of their meeting with Forbes, which was also published as an article titled Stick Google Plus Buttons on your Pages or Your Search Traffic Dies ( yes, I borrowed the title) on 18th August, 2011, but quickly canned by Forbes before it could garner more attention from the not-so-friendly Facebook or the Justice Department. The story was not only removed from Forbes website but was also removed from Google’s cache. However, before they could do all that a copy of the same was saved by the Raven Tools SEO Blog. In case these gets removed, I have got a screen shot of the same too 🙂

Related Posts:

a)Google Plus One Likely to Effect Search Results

b)Exploring Google Plus Tips and Tricks

About "" Has 249 Posts

Check out the About SRC Page for more details about Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury.

16 Comments to “Stick Google Plus Buttons on your Pages or Your Search Traffic Dies”

  1. rajwap says:

    hi
    The way search technology has been improving the only way to stay abreast for Google is to involve human intelligence and Plus One buttons are an excellent way of crowd sourcing human intelligence to judge the quality of search results and websites.

  2. rajesh says:

    I had similar discussion with few of my other SEO friends too and not many of them agreed to the fact. One of the few reason

  3. rajwap says:

    . One of the few reasons I received against the point was that it is too obvious, this could not be applicable for all types of sites because corporate websites are not likely to get Plus Ones compared to blogs and that Google would probably

  4. miftah says:

    I think in the recent, Google also consider public shared a web page to get ranked on Google SERP. how the number of facebook like? or twitter tweet?

  5. Druv says:

    Nice idea, going to add the +1 button to my blog soon! thanks

    Augadha

  6. This post just added more to my curiosity, I would appreciate if you would give us more on Google plus,including the benefits to the stakeholders of SEO and internet marketing.

  7. PalmGeo says:

    Google+ has changed social media services so far. It is a new dimension of sharing data.. Although Facebook is trying its best to defeat Google+. Lets see who will win…….

  8. TopherBricks says:

    Wow, I had always kind of figured Google gave itself an advantage, but I never expected them to publicly admit it. The fact that they retracted the article and seemingly covered it up shows they might be in the wrong there. Thanks for grabbing the screen shot!

  9. rogerburns says:

    Thanks for the instructions. I’ve read about how effective this Google +1 button is for seo and can’t wait to try it out. I see you have several “plus ones” on your posts, have you seen some good results since adding the button o your blog? Thanks

  10. Samual James says:

    There are really a few nice posts where you can get any beneficial information about a topic. And if we talk about marketing and Fidelizacion, your blog is one of them. Congrats for that.

  11. This site is excellent and so is how the subject matter was explained. I also like some of the comments too. Waiting for next post.

  12. Ashwin says:

    It’s true Karthik. Google is going place a heavy emphasis on it’s +1 buttons. It seems to me that the more your content comes with the +1 button, the more likely it is to show up in Google search results.

    Having said that, apart from a few very popular brands and bloggers, the +1 profiles of many people seem to be deserted.

    What do you think?

  13. +1 lets you share recommendations with friends, contacts and the rest of the web when your advice is most helpful – on Google search.

    Also, if you want to start a conversation right now, it’s easy to pick the circles who’ll find it interesting and post to Google+

    @+

  14. MyGrahak says:

    I am a novice when it comes to online marketing strategies. But your reviews on google+ has left me gasping. I never really thought that internet can do such things.As I said I am still a novice at the online marketing space and your blog has been a lesson for me.

    Divya Bhaskar
    MyGrahak.com

  15. I also think that plus 1 is very effective in social circle. It’s impact full.

  16. SEO Company says:

    As per my concern Google+ is very effective social media site. No doubt its very good for SEO purpose but for social networking purpose its very-very good.

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