There has been a lot of talk in SEO land in recent months: Google+ would – unlike other social networks – be beneficial f special databaseor your rankings. At least according to some. According to others, it doesn’t matter at all. Last Friday, Moz went one better by stating that even Gmail can influence your position in the SERPs ( search engine results page ).
Before you happily throw all your site pages on Google+ and enthusiastically start spamming your entire address book with your Gmail account, read on. There are a few important nuances.
Google+ and rankings: correlation or causation?
At the end of August, Moz – one of the most reliable authorities when it comes to SEO – published the results of a future technology: quantum computers and their basic features study that caused quite a stir. After all, they had found that there was a strong correlation between Google+ and a higher position in Google’s search results. And not just any correlation, but a real causal relationship. In contrast to other social networks. Simply put: for example, someone who has a lot of tweets and retweets on an article will generally also score well with that article in the SERPs . But just because your article is (re)tweeted a lot, does not mean that you also score higher in the rankings. Correlation and not causal relationship. According to Moz, this could be different with Google+.But what happened
Nonsense?about the impact of +1’s on rankings. But they actually meant ‘posts on Google+’. An unfortunate choice of words, belgium numbers because the discussion quickly focused on +1’s and not on ‘posts on Google+’. An important nuance, because +1’s (for G+ laymen: a +1 is comparable to a Facebook like) do not indeed have an impact on your rankings. Posts on G+, on the other hand, do. Striking: in his counter-reaction, Matt Cutts only refutes the impact of +1’s and remains completely silent about posts. And as often happens with Matt Cutts: what he doesn’t say is sometimes more important than what he does say.
How Google+ Affects Your Rankings
But how can G+ help influence your rankings? There are two main reasons for this: