There has been a lot of talk in SEO land in recent months: Google+ would – unlike other social networks – be beneficial for 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 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+.
Nonsense?
A bold statement that immediately received a lot of opposition. With the main opponent: Matt Cutts , the head of the Webspam Team at Google. He was quick to dismiss the results of the Moz study as nonsense .
But what happened? In the article, Moz talked about the impact of +1's on rankings. oman mobile phone number list But they actually meant 'posts on Google+'. An unfortunate choice of words, 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.
But how can G+ help influence your rankings? There are two main reasons for this:
If you post an article on G+, it will be indexed much faster. Google originally crawled Twitter to quickly pick up new content. But since the links on Twitter have become nofollow, that is no longer possible. And Facebook is certainly not an option for Google to quickly discover new content, because Facebook shields the data from Google. But on G+, Google does have free rein and can therefore quickly discover and index new things.
The second and most important reason: links shared on G+ are follow links and they pass on link value (if they have any link value at all, of course). This is a notable difference from other social networks. However, this only concerns the link to the article that appears at the bottom of your post and not other links that you include in your post. To illustrate: the green links in the example are follow links, the other links are nofollow links.
jors1