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What the Death of Google+ Means for SEO

What the Death of Google+ Means for SEO

2770-2770-Google
Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons

As Google’s social platform gets stripped for parts, what should social media managers know?

It wasn’t that long ago that Google+ was considered the most important social media platform for Search Engine Optimization. Logically, it only made sense. Google is the largest and most influential search engine in the world, and dictates the factors responsible for ranking highly on its platform. With its own social media platform in place, Google could give better search visibility to brands and marketers that used Google+.

For a while, that was true. Companies that posted content on Google+ saw a range of benefits, including higher search rankings and more visibility with Author profile images embedded on the search results page. But Google+’s popularity never quite saw the growth that it would have needed to become a major competitor for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Gradually, Google+ waned in power, and today, it’s a virtually dead platform. So what does this mean for social media managers who have invested in Google+ as a prominent SEO channel, and for companies looking to break into the social SEO scene?

The Old Line of Thinking

Many believed Google+ would be the social platform to end all social platforms, due largely to the fact that it was Google. At one point, Google+ sign-up was a mandatory part of creating a Google account, and businesses with Google+ profiles ranked higher than those without them.

With Google Authorship, a single author’s profile could be attached to articles on any participating site, and those articles would rank higher and get more visibility because of the attached author image and bio on the search results page.

But when Google did away with this feature, first by removing Author Analytics and then by removing the author picture and bio, many took it as a sign of the opposite: Google’s admission of defeat. The previous head of Google+ left the company shortly after these changes, further strengthening the belief that Google+ was dead in the water.

Bits and Pieces

In some ways, Google+ is dead, but pieces of it will live on. Rather than being destroyed completely or abandoned to wither away in users and relevancy on its own, the social platform is being dismantled and recycled for several related purposes.

The Google+ brand still exists, collecting a number of different social functions together, but soon these functions will stand independent from one another.

For example, Google+’s “Photos” is now a place where individuals can share and view each other’s images (and different than Picasa for storing and editing your photos), and “Streams” is where to go for video-chatting. Bradley Horowitz is now overseeing the management of the Google+ brand, and his intentions appear to indicate a desire to strip Google+ for parts.

Avenues for Content Promotion

Though the authoritative power of Authorship is dead and never coming back, Google+ can still be used in most of its social contexts. It’s possible to, with an individual account, share articles and links to your website for others to see. It’s also possible and advisable to establish a company page through Google+, as it serves Google basic biographical information about your company which it can display in search results.

Google uses social signals to track and analyze the impact and reach of different brands. For example, brands with large followings and large numbers of interactions on multiple social platforms rank much higher than similar brands without such social presence.

In fact, according to an infographic published at AudienceBloom, Google +1s had the highest ranking correlation—in each of two independent correlation studies—among all the tested factors.

While it’s unclear exactly what social signals are factored into Google’s algorithm, it is clear that the more visibility you can get for your content, the better. As of now, Google is still regarding its own Google+ in terms of how much reach and attention each brand is getting, so it’s definitely worth using as a system of content promotion, even though as a system of content creation it’s declining from bad to worse.

Popularity

Google+ was never popular, and that’s why it’s being dismantled the way it is. Since more and more functions of Google+ are being separated into their own respective areas, it’s likely that the slim number of users currently on the platform will continue to decline even further. Keep this in mind if you do choose to use Google+ as an avenue for content syndication. If you use a post scheduler to do all the work for you, it won’t hurt to have Google+ as a separate channel, but be wary not to spend too much time on it.

The Bottom Line

Google+ is on its way out, though the name and core functionality will likely stick around for a while. The platform will never have the amount of impact it was purported to one day achieve, and if you continue to invest time and money into Google+ as a major element of your SEO campaign, you will continue to see declining returns. Authorship, the biggest original selling point of the platform, is almost entirely defunct, and using Google+ as a means of content creation is virtually useless.

Nevertheless, there are some benefits to remaining on Google+. It’s still worthwhile as a channel for promoting your existing content, establishing your business information, and communicating with others (assuming they’re on the platform) due to its “Hangouts” functionality. Author Rank may still be a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm working behind the scenes, drawing data from Google+. But even in the short term, remember that Google+’s user count is low and falling; taper your strategies accordingly.

Find out 10 ways you might be sabotaging your search ranking—and stay away from those common SEO mistakes to get the online traffic you want and need.

via: What the Death of Google+ Means for SEO

 

Google Seeks Searcher Satisfaction

Here’s another great post below from Nathan Safran from Conductor.com

If you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on with the SERPS, you’ve probably noticed the latest Hummingbird update nuked a whole bunch of EMD’s and PMD’s.  Also for most of the markets I’ve been following, the top 10 consist entirely of authority sites that obviously have a ton of “stickiness” – check out the following post.

Nathan’s Post on SearchEngineLand

Another relevant comment by Jeff Smith noted:
“Google patent search and search for “searcher satisfaction” and patents assigned to Google, you will find confirmation that this is an important metric. It’s also important to note that satisfaction seems directly tied to user loyalty, which would of course be critical to maintaining or growing market share.”

So in a nutshell, there’s many aspects to SEO that will be basically IMPOSSIBLE to manipulate or automate. True SEO really depends on providing the whole enchilada in terms of user experience and not just optimizing on-page factors or having backlinks.

Why You Need Content for SEO

So do shares and likes (social signals) as well as low bounce rates influence SEO? Does a one legged duck swim in circles?

Content-for-SEO

Article Marketing for SEO?

“Is article marketing still a good link and traffic acquisition technique?

*This is an excerpt from two of the top authorities in Search Engine Optimization, Leslie Rohde and Dan Thies.

So Dan and Leslie basically break it down into the following regarding article marketing’s effectiveness for 2013 onward:  The simple answer is “no”, but let’s explain and defend that, okay?

There are a couple different things we want to get from links. Everybody talks about ranking, and links certainly help (a lot!) with that, but when done right, links also provide targeted traffic.

Maybe an article directory could provide some traffic, but how well targeted would it be? Not very. And, Google has never liked article directories and has recently gotten very good at not only discounting the links, but reducing the ranking of these directories as well.

The links that Google really wants are the “natural” links created by people because they value and share your content. That is very specifically NOT what article directories are about. Instead, what they provide is a place for webmasters to pick up and republish content to “fatten up” their own sites.

This unavoidably creates duplicate content and builds links from sites that have zero to minimal interest in your site – or maybe even your topic!

So if the links aren’t counted by Google and the traffic is (at best) of questionable value, is “article marketing” really even marketing at all?

Well, never say never, but we stopped teaching it years ago and have no plans to start teaching it again. There are far far better ways to use
your content that we’ll discuss in future posts.

Until then …

Keep creating quality content your readers love and engage with, not for the search engines!

Learn how to interpret your webstats

It’s definitely interesting when you REALLY start looking at your webstats / site analytics.  There’s so much valuable data that analytics saves it’s a shame that most webmasters or companies don’t pay any attention whatsoever to what their visitors are actually doing on their site – or how they got their in the first place for that matter.

On the same note – the data is also meaningful when you see what your competition is trying to do in order to “reverse engineer” what you’re doing.  It’s actually quite funny that people are still trying to outrank me for certain terms when they don’t seem to realize that those terms aren’t even being searched by the public at large – and really only being searched by SEO guys like us just for the sake of seeing what ranks!  I’m going to revive one of my experiments I did on one of my other sites I conducted back in 2009.  I tried to rank for a certain keyword phrase with a mastermind group I was running and wanted to demonstrate to them how you could rank very quickly – sometimes hours depending on how competitive the keyword was.  Well, fast forward 3 years and it appears other SEO’s have decided to throw down the gauntlet.  Let’s see if I can outrank my OTHER page for that keyword using this site and I’ll post the results later.  Stay tuned!

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