Google Search Plus Your World
Myths, Benefits & Next Steps
In case you missed it Google made some major changes last week (seems I say that a lot eh?). We haven’t seen them roll out in AU yet but I got a chance to have a look at them & have a bit of a play. When they were launched Twitter came out & immediately said they were terrible for.. well pretty much everyone including Twitter users. There were a lot of other myths too.
- People will stop using Google & move to Bing
- Google Authorship, personalised search & search history are the same thing.
- It’s a major privacy breach
- and of course…. its the end of SEO
None of these are actually true. Search Plus is a reorganisation of the data that Google was already displaying to you plus more of your own data. I used to use the Google desktop app when I was on Windows back in 2008 because it helped me find stuff on my PC quickly. Now that so much data is been moved to the cloud, a lot of the personal results you see may relate to photos you store on Google+ or some of your docs. Remember this won’t be indexed for everyone. Just you. Like the your friend “shared this” results, you will see more Google+ results from your network. You can switch off the personalised results anytime you want. 
Authorship is the big change.
As Rand Fishkin pointed out at SEOMOZ the big change that we are seeing is Authorship. Here is what author attribution has looked like for the last 6 months
Basically just a photo along side the result. Now we will see it take it’s own section of real estate on the search results page at the top right hand side. You will see the Google+ pages links of celebrities there as well as quality authors relevant for the search. 
Authorship is about branding
Back in 2008 the then CEO of Google Eric Schmidt said the Internet was a cesspool and the only way to clean it up was via authenticated (my word) brands. This is pretty much what Authorship is. For a lot of searches this will stop the linkspammers in their tracks. This is the evolution of the old PageRank. Online Reputation Management just became a whole lot easier. Just get a bunch of mates with Authorship to write a nice article about you:)
What should your brand be doing?
Brands – At the very least key people in your organisation should have their Google profiles setup & your should claim Google+ pages for all your product brands.
Bloggers – Make sure you have authorship setup on your own blog & if you contribute to other properties make sure it is setup on profile & ask the other properties to setup authorship linking back to your Google profile. This is important! The more reputable publications that use your authorship the more influential in the SERPs your content will be.
Everyone – Get more people adding you to their circles. The more circles you are in the more time your recommendations / shares will appear. At some point I am sure we will see “cash for shares” paid to people with large following to influence the SERPs but if Google finds out you lose not only your ranking but all your Google accounts. Gmail, docs the lot. This is how they will clean up Eric Schmidt’s “cesspool”
Enjoy the show 🙂
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
