In just a few short weeks since its launch, Google Plus has already passed twenty million users, and is scheduled to reach one hundred million users within the next four to five months. This explosive growth may show that Google might have finally gotten social right after a couple of failed starts with Buzz and Wave. While Google may have a long road ahead of it in catching up to current social media darling Facebook, search engine optimization (SEO) professionals are already talking about how Google Plus might affect current and future SEO endeavors, and some theories have been generated as a result.
The first idea is that Google will use Google Plus to mine even more data from its users, including posted photos, shared links and the content of posts to create even more targeted ads for Google users, whether they're in Google Plus, Gmail or regular Google results pages. Social networks are a gold mine of user information, and Google knows this, as its watched Facebook continually use such data for stronger ads across its network. This could also mean that Google will use this data to influence search results as well, based on popular trending topics, but again, it's just a theory.
Another concern is the +1 button, which has been a part of Google's search results for some time now. SEO professionals worry that the +1 button will be manipulated and abused to give higher rankings to sites that don't actually deserve them; similar to what happened recently with social bookmarking site Digg. While one hopes this wouldn't happen, and if it did that Google would rectify the situation quickly, as Digg tried to (too little and too late though), it's got SEO professionals concerned.
One more thing that Professionals SEO seems concerned with are "Sparks". These are news channels you can set up in your feed on nearly any topic, and they parse news similar though in a much more limited and nowhere nearly as comprehensive manner to Google News. SEO professionals are wondering what they have to do to tweak news stories, blogs and so on to show up in these Sparks, because people are then likely to share them across their circles. According to Google's DeWitt Clinton, the algorithm that Sparks uses is still very much in flux, so it might be some time before we can determine how to make the most of it.
As you can see, there's not a small amount of concern over how Google Plus can affect the SEO field in the future. As always, SEO professionals like those at 180Fusion have to stay abreast of what's happening in the industry so that they may react to industry changes and trends as quickly as possible.
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