How Google+ is changing social SEO and affecting PageRank
Ranked 6th overall behind sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, Google+ has long been an underdog in the social game. But even though Google is having trouble competing for individual user’s social media attention, the business side of Google+ is beginning to reap powerful rankings for companies that successfully incorporate a +1 strategy.
Not surprisingly, Google developed their social platform to directly connect with search results, allowing Google+ posts to pass through Google PageRank . Google PageRank helps the search engine determine where your webpage should appear in search results (among many other pieces of a very complicated algorithm). Google wants to continue to be more useful to their users while also increasing how efficiently and how much data they can collect.
Last week, a Moz study was released that shows a strong correlation between Google+ usage by a company and that company’s PageRank in Google search engine results pages (SERPS). This finding made a HUGE splash in the SEO community as Search Engine Marketers attempted to disprove the shocking news that Google would favor their own social medium this way. Quickly after the commotion began, an official Google search spokesperson issued a response statement discrediting the research and denying any impact of Google+ in Google’s search algorithm.
Although Google’s Matt Cutts denied a direct causation, a correlation still exists between +1’s and your sites PageRank. Since the Panda and Penguin updates, Google has placed roughly 70% of all search value into the reputation of your site and judges this value based on the quality of your inbound links. Their rules are similar to the adage “a man is known by the company he keeps.”
Google+ can help with reputation and inbound links in 3 ways:
- Google+ offers followed links. Many other social media sites do not allow PageRank to be passed through links, including two of the most popular: Facebook & Twitter.
- Google considers +1’s to be content placed on a relevant and valuable site (imagine that!).
- Successful social media campaigns tend to generate a strong click-through rate, which can give your site a temporary boost in search rankings.
So, what Moz deemed to be causation (i.e. a site has many +1’s therefore it is ranked higher in Google), is actually more likely a correlation. If a site gains a lot of traffic through a link posted at a reputable website (like Google’s own Google+), its PageRank will rise. Google has a PageRank of 9/10, so any link coming from Google+ is going to give your site a slight bump in rankings if you follow SEO best practices.
So, through basic, legitimate link building, Google+ does represent a simple, strong method to grow PageRank through social media.
Perhaps the social media audience isn’t spending a lot of time in the Google+ interface, but marketers, companies and bloggers should consider putting a little bit of effort into Google+ marketing. Join forces between SEO and social media marketing for a fast (genuine) link-building effort, that focuses on how users consume content, not just Google.
