How Google Search Plus Your World Affects SEO
Google is now undergoing a major change in their search engine as they implement ‘Search Plus your World’ – it is simply integrating Google + into their search engine algorithm in order to serve it in their search engine results page.
Social Takes Center stage
We can see social having a bigger part in the search engines. It’s slowly but surely creeping in and taking center stage. There have even been news that social is the new linkbuilding – and that linkbuilding is dead (which is simply not true).
Search Plus your World takes social one step further into its grasp on search. You have to be signed in to Google (meaning you have to have a Google account) to take advantage of its benefits.
What does it do?
Basically, Search Plus your World helps you dig into Google+ data and pulls this data out together with the usual search engine results, and shows it to you. This data may concern people in your circles, their photos, what they’ve shared, +1’d, etc…
Search Plus your World combines both personalized search (which deals with tracking your logged-in personal searches) and social search (which deals with your social media connections and efforts affecting search results). It merges it in a way that tries to make the search engine’s results more relevant to you in terms of your personal intentions behind the query.
How Search Plus your World affects SEO
Search Plus your World shifts the paradigm to a whole new level. Suddenly, you have to be in the Circles of everyone! You want your company to be in the Circles of anyone and everyone in your market. You want your Google + Page to be easily accessible and looked for by people in your market.
Search Plus your World promotes Google+ in a very compelling way. Companies will realize that having a Google+ page, and promoting it, is a must – if they want to get better (albeit personalized) rankings in Google.
On top of that, if you are on a lot of people’s circles, you would want to keep on sharing your stuff all over – so that it would appear on your circle’s ‘personal results’.
People and Pages
Search Plus your World now lets you check out people and pages in Google + in the SERPs. It really highly encourages all people to go into Google +. We still don’t exactly know how Search Plus your World ranks relevance in order for your Google+ profile or page to appear on the right-hand corner of the search results. We’re guessing that it’s a combination of profile keywords, +1s from people with relevant profiles, number of people with relevant profiles who have you in their circles.
The more people seeing you on the People and Pages on Google+ results, the more chances of you getting more people in your niche into your circles. Crazy.
The Social Landscape
Search Plus your World is currently set at default and you would have to opt out if you don’t like the feature. It gives you an option to switch back to the previous version of search – which segregates social and personalized search results from the normal, unpersonalized ones through a toggle button on the upper right side of the query text area.
Knowing that, we can now say that ‘personalized’ and ‘social’ search is now the norm. Search has changed drastically in the past few years. And it’s changing even faster as social slowly but surely changes the landscape.
Search Plus your World definitely encourages people to go social. Cut down your linkbuilding efforts, and increase your Google+ promotion!
Chances are, sooner or later, there will be a lot of new players for Social Media Optimization. It’s getting bigger and bigger and the bearing on search is getting heavier and heavier..
Tips for Keeps: BEEF UP YOUR GOOGLE+ PROFILE AND PAGES!!!
