If you haven’t figured it out yet, activity and participating in Google+ can greatly change the results you and your network sees when searching online for information. As this recent article on personalized search by Danny Sullivan states, Google+ can trump many other common SEO tactics for increasing your search rank.
As I was sharing with a client yesterday and explaining what Google+ was, I stated that it might be considered a Facebook killer, but that wasn’t its real intended purpose in my mind. For me, the purpose is to further establish identity and personalization efforts for searchers. I added, if you think Google is a search engine, your mistaken. Google is an advertiser network. I believe every action they take and product they develop is ultimately used to collect information to deliver more personalized results and information to their users… and make lots of money doing so in the process.
So if Google’s purpose is to become more centrally integrated into delivering targeted advertising and information, how can they continue to push this envelope? In my opinion it’s an expansion of what they’re doing with Google Authorship. Identify associating validated content within a community. This helps deliver a level of more quality content while excluding junk or spammy content from results.
I can’t imagine a spam network that is going to create a Google+ profile linking all of their websites and social profiles together to be seen as a legitimate content provider. They still deliver spammy content, and then all Google would need to do to ostracize their content is just meander over to their Google+ profile and blacklist every associated profile and website link.
On the flip-side, legitimate content producers will do exactly this within Google+ to establish a brand and identity portal for everything they’re involved.
One of the things that’s bothered me about Google+ as a content producer though was that I couldn’t push content into Google+ using many of the standard tools I’ve become used to for publishing content to other networks like Facebook, Twitter, Facebook Pages, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc. That’s actually caused me to use Google+ less and I believe that’s another intentional tactic by Google. I don’t think they want it to be easy to push content to Google+ from other areas.
Let’s look at the flip-side again though.
What if Google+ became the central location you were able to go to and push a status update to Facebook or Twitter? What if Google+ allowed me to easily begin publishing content directly to those sites I’ve already identified myself as a contributor? What if Google allowed me to push content directly to a WordPress site using the publishing protocol? I’ll let your mind run with all the other potential connections you find yourself using on a daily basis.
Would that functionality quickly make Google+ THE default location for me to go to everyday and publish and promote all of my content? You bet! I’m all about efficiency and that would save tons of time.
Imagine this, because it’s tied with Google and thus could be tied to a verified Google Analytics account, what if every piece of content I published to all these other channels were automatically tagged and identified through various tracking campaigns and keywords. What do you think now?
Then, Google could quickly verify and validate content based on it being published from a trusted source, Google+, to an also verified and related destination of the same publisher’s established network.
And that is how I believe Google+ could quickly become the epicenter of your social experience and in the long run, the entire online social experience.
