The online marketing and SEO world is abuzz about Google+ again, in the wake of some changes made by Google last week.
In essence, Google is rolling out some changes to its search results that gives extra weight to content shared through its social network, Google+.
SEO Moz is a search engine research site in the US that reports on changes to search engine optimisation and this week it has released a 10 minute video on the marketing relevance of Google’s latest changes to search and what it means to your company and your future visibility in search results.
My question is this: If Top End businesses spend time playing with Google+ and at the very least make the effort to share links to new web content through the service, could we give the Top End an advantage in search, particularly for those products and services in which we are competing against the states and the world?
I will unpack that a little more over the coming months.
If you want to take a peek at Google+, I have launched The RITE Series Google+ page today so we can see what organic goodness can be cultivated there. I hope you join me.
This will be interesting to watch. Apart from whether this is a clever marketing ploy on Google’s part, there is a fair chance it will upset a lot of people.
To quote the seo-moz video”"Hey, you’re doing monopolistic behavior using your vast market share advantage in Search to force people to use your social network.” I don’t want to comment on that. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a political expert, or anything like that, but what I can say is, as a marketer, Google’s very, very clearly forcing our hand and making sure that we use Google+. ”
The key here is that as a monopoly Google is trying to use it’s position to force the market. There are laws against this in many places, including Australia.
If Google does get control over both search and social media it will not be to the advantage of SME’s.
Yes, Jim, interesting indeed.
On one hand it can be seen as monopolistic behaviour.
On the other hand it can be seen as a way of determining some social proof behind the value of web content, ie, the more people talking about and sharing a page in Google+, the clearer the signal that it is of value.
Of course, that latter scenario could be done by incorporating Twitter and Facebook, etc, and that would make it squeaky clean. At the same time, I am curious to see whether this filter will help rid my search results of garbage that has been created just to clog the top rankings in Google through trickery and not through the crafting of valuable content for a specific audience.
One thing I do know, it would be dangerous for Google to take its search monopoly for granted.
Thanks for your comment.