Google +1

Johannes Beus
The last few month, we've seen extensive speculation on how Google would react to the winning-streak of Facebook's like-button. Now Google unveiled their own strategy: dubbed Google +1 (Google plus one), Google is pretty closely copying Facebook's successful attempt, while adding functionality at the same time.

This means that besides the mandatory “+1” button, there will be a few more really interesting integrations for a homepage. It should not come as a surprise that soon, you will be able to vote on certain results in the SERPs, which will give them an emphasis in their display. There will also be a counter below such results, showing how many other users voted on them. More interesting to me is the fact that the same voting will take place for AdWords-advertisements – without a way for those running the ads of turning this off. It is still somewhat unclear how Google will set up their network between users: they lack a clear functionality as seen with Facebook. Officials commented that they will base this on GMail contacts as well as Google's contact-list. I envision that Google will expand this approach, in the future. For those of you who want to go ahead and try the new feature: you can sign up for it in Google Labs.

All in all, this is a move that Google was expected to make for a while now: without social-data, in the future, no searchengine will be able to return results to users that they expect to see. I am confident that, with the help of Google +1 and due to their marketing power and reach, they will quickly gather the necessary data to set up a comprehensive ranking-factor to integrate into the SERPs. The groundwork for such a move seems to have been set with the Caffeine infrastructure-update which enables data to continually be updated – Google's datacenters will not be bored, for sure.

Johannes Beus

 Johannes Beus, Founder and CEO of SISTRIX, has been interested in the optimisation of websites for searchengines since 2001. In 2003 he started to regularly publish summaries of his evaluations and share his thoughts on the SEO-sector on one of the oldest German SEO-blogs.
Johannes Beus - on Wed (03/30/2011) at 20:34 PM

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Jens Müller
1
Jens Müller
04/26/2011 at 14:20
it will be quite interesting what further adjustments regarding the social search will be made in the future to make the google +1 button really comparable to the facebook i like button.


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