Google Develops Their Social Side with +1

At the end of March, Google launched their “+1″ button, which enables people to recommend content on the web. Widely compared to Facebook’s “Like” button, this is seen as another attempt by Google to enter the social networking space, after the poor response to Buzz last year.

The Google +1 service (pronounced “Plus One”) is gradually being rolled out from its beta development stage and is mainly available to users in the US at the moment. It’s designed for people who are logged in to their Google account to recommend web pages and other content to their social networks and Google hopes that this will become a widely accepted and used system.

Searchers will see the +1 button against all search results in time – both organic and from Google Ads (AdWords) – and these will be greyed out. Once a user clicks the button it will appear as a coloured icon and the recommendation will be logged against the user’s Google profile, so that they will have a record of the recommendation and their network of friends will also see these details. The user will also see those sites that their friends have recommended as being tagged with the coloured +1 button.

In addition to the +1 button showing up in the search results, Google will be also be making a +1 button available for web users to recommend something without leaving a website. This is part of Google’s goal of providing quality search content on the web and thus will allow good quality content that is shared to positively impact its SEO rankings. This is expected to have a significant effect upon SEO, as content that has many +1 “stamps of approval” will probably rank better in the search results, at least as one of the signals used by the search engine.

There has been much talk about how the elements of social networking will be used to contribute to search results, in the same way that links do at the moment. However, after the initial “buzz” around the launch of +1, Google has to get this system accepted and used by people and +1′s will clearly face an uphill struggle to compete with “Likes” from the Facebook system.

If you’d like to know more about the Google +1 button and what impact this may have on search results in the future, contact us now.

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