Google is rolling out new features to integrate their Google+ social network with their Search services almost every week. Now that the network has grown to over 80 million members and continues to grow at a rapid rate, the implications of their new features are expanding rapidly as they are adopted more widely. One of the new ways that you can use Google+ as a business is to help improve your search performance and traffic from Google. There are a few ways in which Google+ can impact search results, including the +1 button, new markup for identifying authors, and more. While some of these features have existed for a little while already, new functionality is being added to them constantly and it’s important to stay up to date on how they are being used.
One immediate way that you can see Google+’s impact on search results is by their introduction of the “Author” tag for blogs. Using this new HTML tag, bloggers and authors online can claim ownership of their blog and attach it to a specific Google+ personality. You can
learn more details about setting up this tag here. While this can be valuable for you as a blogger by giving your readers a way to follow you online and learn more about you, it also has an impact on other Google products. For example, this is what having the author tag set up can do to your own search results.
Not only is my blog post ranking at the very top of Google (despite several more authoritative domains writing similar articles), but my article includes a headshot and links to my Google+ profile, where people can read more of my content and the other things that I share. While this isn’t specifically new (The Author tag has been around since July 2011), the implications of this have been steadily growing over the last few months as the use the information in new ways. Google also originally limited which websites could take advantage of the Author tag, but it appears that most websites can now use this tag.
It’s also good to note that on the first search result, Google provides another helpful link for people who are trying to find more information about me. This link, “
More by Brian Whalley” that returns indepth results from my Google+ profile and sites that I’ve tagged as being associated. Searchers who click on that link get a kind of mini-profile of me and links to some of my recent public status updates on Google+. This is a great way for searchers who are looking for more information to see more about me without having to leave Google.
The greatest benefit to this for a brand or person is the increase in visibility and clicks. I don’t need to worry about other people’s content ranking on my name or brand because I have supplied Google with so much authoritative content about the topic of “Brian Whalley” that they are compelled to rank this result first. Sound familiar? That’s because this works the same way that the rest of the Google algorithm does - I supplied authoritative content and inbound links to my profile and website, and then it ranks very well in search. Google ranks this optimized content very well in search, and so you can also count on people finding your information quickly.
There are many benefits to doing this for your own business - By publicly establishing the face, background, and experience of your bloggers or other important people for your business, you can present your best face to any searchers looking for your content. This is especially valuable because of the association you can create with your non-branded content. It might seem obvious that Google can present a picture and profile when someone searches for my name, the greatest benefits come when associated with non-branded content, like in the first example.
While the appearance is new, it doesn’t look like these new search results around personalities and brands really represent new ground for Google. Instead, they represent the ongoing evolution of something Google has been working on since 1999 - How to separate out different types of search results and present them effectively to searchers. This is now just the latest step in that direction as Google owns more and more of this data over time. It is absolutely worth it to incorporate more information and services from the search engine into your own website.