Is Google's future moving towards an opinionated search engine?
The game we play with search engines can be dangerous as we trick them into believing a page has valuable information worthy to top the SERP's, this can be done in many ways as Google's algorithm is so in depth but with the recent boom in social networking are social signals more valuable to a search engine like Google?
Facebook has a strong following reaching a high of 750 million users and the information shared on the network is invaluable, Larry Page the new CEO of Google sees Facebook as its main competitor in valuable search data. The information available in Facebook through posts, comments and activities is very rich and Google can't access this information. So is this one of the reasons why they brought out their own social networking platform as having access to personal views could take a step forward in opinionated search? In the privacy policy of Google+ they don't deny the fact that all posts, comments and interactions are recorded to be used on other Google Services. If you take a look at Search Engine Land's blog on 'How being friends on Google leads to better rankings' you can see an example of this occurring.
We live in an era where people aren't afraid to share personal information on social platforms or personal websites so the quality of some pages is astounding as they have authenticity and passion, if people in the SEO world continue adding the same old keyword rich content at the bottom of a page Google won't see this as authentic or showing an opinion and it could drop in the rankings. This is the same for number of advertisements and layout of a page, for more on this visit Aaron Wheeler's whiteboard Friday blog on 'How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever, Whiteboard Friday'.
Let's take a closer look at Google+
Did anyone as a business get an invite or acceptation? No? It seems like only very established businesses did and this gives them a head start on their social campaign. If or when Google+ gets released publicly businesses will have to take time to establish a social campaign, linking to circles with many people would influence the SERP's as the business can recommend pages (also done through the +1 button) to friends which then show up top in the rankings. Again this is furthering Google's goal of creating the most valid results in the SERP's through human opinion on websites and another way SEO's or strategists can play the game with Google.
So is Google+ this important to companies looking to top SERP's and are Google going to develop their search engine in this way? One thing is for sure, if it does another panda update will be coming shortly and our SEO job will get more difficult so get ready.
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and SEO is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
