With the new year came new features in Google+, Google’s own social media agency. As you all know, Google is now the leading search engine today, with Yahoo! and Bing sharing 15% of the rest of the market. Google+ now boasts of over 90 million users as 2011 ended and every new user and +1 added to Google+, more data is being added to Google’s social graph.
One of the latest features of Google+ is the “Search Plus Your World”, which integrates Google’s own search engine and social network. For a search engine optimization, this means that Google+’s 90 million users are now combined with the search engine’s growing knowledge graph. While there are no concrete results on how this new feature affects search engine rankings, experts are now finding out more about this new feature and how it will impact the search engine optimization industry.
For one, Google will now be able to control roughly around two-thirds of all Internet searches. As Google improves the relevance of user queries through social search, search engine optimization specialists are now beginning to experiment how exactly social searches improve page rankings. The +1, for example, results to a page’s higher click-through-rate (CTR) because the +1 is only shared within a user’s own Google+ circle, which is composed of individuals that only the user knows or trusts, making the link highly clickable and sharable. The same goes for other social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Google’s own webmaster has stated that “this is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality.” However, the debate about whether the new feature is relevant or not still goes on as search engine optimization companies continue to experiment with the results of searching certain keywords on Google and Google+.
One thing is for sure though. The fact that Google is the only major social network with its own search engine, considered as the largest in the SEO industry, means that every search engine optimization company should have an active Google+ brand page to keep up with the competition.