by Corey Morris, emfluence Search Engine Marketing Strategist
Google rolled out a big update recently called “Search, plus Your World.” While the search community has written many in-depth articles about how it works – like this great one from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land – here’s a brief look at what marketers need to know about the update.
First and foremost, don’t get caught in the hype surrounding this update. Google makes hundreds of algorithm updates a year. And Google has invested far more in in Google+ than in previous Google social tools, which are now defunct. “Search, plus Your World” is here to stay. It integrates what was once private, personal content presumably restricted to Google+ into search results for those Google users who have Google+ accounts/profiles that perform searches while still logged into Google.
This might sound new, but we have been getting personalized, geo-targeted search results for years now. This is one more type of personalization being done in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The big difference here is that things just got real personal – like, my-friends-and-private-info personal. I’m possibly seeing a friend’s post about college football sorted in with my normal organic rankings on a search regarding my favorite college team. Pretty big stuff, huh?
Still, this is no time to panic. We actually get a long desired function in this new update. We get new controls that allow us to turn off personalization and see the full set of organic search results. We can toggle between the default blended results, the un-personalized organic set, or just the personalized content. This is great, because in the past there hasn’t been a clear or easy way to do this.
We all know that web design, web development, SEO, and social media marketing are not self-contained services. This change by Google illustrates that very clearly. Google keeps blurring the lines between SEO and social, and while G+ is currently the only social platform integrated into Google search results, it seems unlikely that the company indexing everything online is going to stop there.
Dig deeper by checking out this post on the Marketer do’s and don’ts in light of Google’s "Search, plus Your World" update.
