If you spend a lot of time online and hanging out on techie websites like this one then you can’t fail to have noticed that Google has just launched its own brand new button for sharing, called Google +1. That’s why everywhere you look from websites to paid advertisements to their search results, you’ll soon be seeing the +1 sign. But what does it actually do?
Essentially +1 will be a button that functions in the same way as a ‘Thumbs Up’, ‘StumbledUpon’, Digg or a Facebook like – it will be another tool for sharing with everyone that you approve of, like or recommend the site that you have just been reading or browsing and you feel that other people should have a look at that site too. Or, in the more complicated way that Daniel Dulitz, the product manager of Google put it,
“Google +1 is an annotation system which reinforces the interactions between organic and paid results, web pages, and your Google contacts.”
The process is simple – once you have given a plus one rating to a site there is then a counter that tells everyone else how many different people have given the plus one rating too. This counter will then act as a gauge to tell how popular that piece of content or that site is and how often it has been shared.
When it comes to your own website, there is no harm in having the full range of sharing buttons on display and the advantages of having the Google version are clear. In the very brief time that Google Plus One has been around (since March) the figures show that Google’s version, Plus One has already outpaced the Twitter share button in terms of the number of times used and is being taken up and implemented at almost double the rate of Twitter’s version. 4.5% of websites already have Google Plus
One which is more than the combined total of Twitter Instant Follow and Twitter Share. And with Google being as important as it is in terms of SEO and the effectiveness of your site you would not and should not, ignore Google +1. Facebook still has the most popular social add-ons and plugins of all, with their ‘like box’ and like button’ plugins, but you would not bet against Google overtaking them.
What effect then does all this have on your site SEO? So far Google have remained tight lipped on the subject but it does not take a genius to work out that it will soon play a big part. Google has always been keen on mining the social network data for their algorithm calculations and have not had access to the Twitter or Facebook figures – three guesses which social media they will use to calculate social popularity and importance?
The lesson, then is that business sites, whether they are selling books or offering a phone number search service, blogging about travelling or discussing organic skin care – no matter what the website does, if it wants to keep on going upwards, it is probably going to need Google +1.
This is a guest post by Alex, you can check out the guidelines to guest post here.
Image Credit: Seriftuts
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