Why Google Wants What It Wants In 2014: Part 2 – Google+

When Google+ launched in 2011 Google seemed to be hoping at the very least that they had a facebook competitor on their hands, if not a facebook killer. But unfortunately this didn’t go according to plan. As a recreational social media platform it pretty much fell flat, but that didn’t stop them.

Over the past few years they have integrated all aspects of Google into one account, which includes Google+. You may have noticed the comments section in YouTube now requires a Google+ account and that related content from these accounts can appear in the comments even though it’s not technically a comment on the video itself. Google Glass will also use Google+ by default, their cloud service is linked, as is the calendar and a range of other features.

As mentioned in the first part of this 5 part blog series and contrary to popular opinion this is not just Google trying to push you around, there is a reason for it.

Google+ was launched to address the fact that their search engine (based around an algorithm which assessed websites for quality and networks online) was not factoring in the skyrocketing social aspect of the online world. They saw the advantage in working this into their assessments of the value of a website because after fighting dodgy SEO companies on the link building and content front, here was something which was way more genuine and harder to fake.

The problem was however, most of that data they were so hungry for was in the hands of facebook. After the failing of Google+ as a straight up social media pastime, they changed tacts and started integrating everything so that they could start to take advantage of the power of social, which they (rightly) seem to believe will personalise the internet and allow for a user generated assessment of the value of websites. People don’t give positive (+1) reviews unless they mean it, so this is the best possible way to figure out what the end user wants and how to rank websites on the search engine.

On top of this, the accounts are valued as well. This is where the content part of the previous blog comes into it. Post content. Regularly. Promote engagement, make it legitimate. Social Media is beginning to affect your rankings in ways no-one ever dreamed possible just a few short years ago. Which takes us into part 3 of the series: Link Building and the impact of social (and content) on it. Stay tuned!

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