Google Begins +1 Experiment

By Liam Lally 30th March 2011 Blog & 2 more

Anyone doubting the importance of “social search” really ought to be looking at what Google is doing right now.

Kipp Bodnar at HubSpot posted a great article about Google +1

After recently confirming that social networking DOES have an impact on your natural search listing (i.e. it has been incorporated into the Google Search Algorithm), Google has started to experiment with real time recommendations of search results (both Natural Search and Google AdWords).

When signed into Google with your Google account, users will begin to see an option to “+1” a search result or Google AdWords advert, this is a way of “recommending” the site you found as being useful, and matching what you were looking for. Very similar to a Facebook “like”, this “recommendation” will then be visible to any of the people within your own network who come across the same site.

Please see the video below for a more succinct explanation from Google

At the moment I assume this is only available in the US (or Google.com) and as you have to sign in to use this service, I am guessing that UK based users probably won’t get to see this just yet.

If this is widely liked and rolled out fully, this could have a significant impact on both the Google Natural Search positions AND the Google AdWords adverts. Despite what people say, Google has always been about giving it’s users the best quality results it can find, and the Google Algorithm has continually found ways of over coming the spammers, directories (to an extent) and the poor quality affiliate websites (to an extent).

It will be interesting to see whether Google shows search results +1’d by your friends ONLY, or whether it will take the approach of showing (or incorporating) the most popular websites +1’d across all it’s users.

What is becoming very clear, is that Google knows the popularity, value and culture change towards social networking, and is working hard to ensure that it continues to represent the “best” search option for people moving forward.

It also means that the goal posts of SEO are moving yet again.

Now where is that bloke who said “social search” would make Google search redundant within 2 years…….

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