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How important is Google +

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Ian J

Ian J

Free Member
Nov 6, 2004
7,440
2,741
Midlands
factoringsolutions.co.uk
My site has been well ranked by Google as it has been in the top ten results (therefore page one) for the last ten years but following on from the recent round of black and white animals it has slipped down to 12th which means that it's now on page two and therefore unseen by anybody.

My site has always been written with the reader in mind, has been around for 12 years and has a reasonable amount of fairly decent links.

The number three slot has now been taken by one of my competitors who has appeared from nowhere, who's website has only been online for two years, doesn't have many inbound links, isn't exactly text rich, doesn't have the keyword in the domain name and the ranking for the single word "factoring" is for an inside page and not the home page.

I've been scratching my head trying to work out what this company has done to account for it's sudden surge in popularity with Google and then I spotted the Google +1 and it seems that it has 252 "likes" on Google Plus.

In addition the Google search snippet includes "***** Rating: 4.8 - 97 reviews"

Any idea whether this manipulation of Google Plus can account for the high ranking on it's own or am I missing something?
 
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There have been several articles on SearchEngineLand this year about Google+ and the effect it has on SEO.

Although i'm not convinced by social media as a whole, I can see there is potential for Google to possibly 'favour' those who are using Google+.

Here is a link to one of the (many) articles featured earlier this year.

http://searchengineland.com/two-google-seo-guides-you-should-read-111703

Hope you find it useful!
 
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Social signals account for 20% +/- of the overall search algorithm. There've been numerous studies to prove this point, though you'd have to do your own research to confirm.

There's also the issue that social signals wear off quickly and are NOT evergreen. In other words, social signals have to constantly be pumped up in order to maintain velocity, otherwise they wither quickly and the benefit fades.

Of course Google is going to give some preferences to Google+ over other networks - they have a vested interest in making that abortion of a social network into something people will use, despite how kludgy, unintuitive and generally pointless it may be....
 
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That site may have earned the G+ count in a way not advised by Google and if so they will see it wiped out sooner or later. Personally I don't think G+ is worth the effort unless you have the time to dedicate to it and create almost a separate website from it. To do that for a few percentages seems pointless to me. I would rather send an hour looking for customers in place where I know they gather then stick an add in a window on street most people never walk.
 
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Google + has an ever increasing effect on rankings. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz talked of an experiment he tried and got a site ranked well on G+'s alone.

There's plenty of fake G+s, just as there are FB likes and Tweets but I believe Google is turning a blind eye to these while it tries to push the prominence of G+.

Matt
 
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I do think the the ranked in google is very important for one commercial business website, it will be easy for people to find you, I have always promotion on this, but the effect is not good as my anticipate.

Is there any good advice for getting one good ranked in google, but not to spend so much money
 
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Google Plus is an important tool for both big as well as small businesses. The brand pages of Google plus was opened in November. This allowed businesses to be a part of the social network.
 
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