If Google is the No. 1 search engine in the world, there will be a reason: despite the numerous collateral services (from Google Adwords campaigns to Google Offers ) it has never stopped improving in its primary function, implementing its own algorithm to provide to the user , results that are as relevant as possible to what they are looking for and more and more personalized .
Search Plus Your World is yet another step in this direction, launched for months now for searches in English on Google.com . What is it about?
A user with a Google+ account , once logged in, when you go to search on Google you will see results returned not only from the web as usual, but also fished directly from your profile or from those of friends included in your circles . No longer the best serp ever, but the best serp for him .
With an example this innovation will be immediately clearer.
Amit Singhal , a Google employee who introduced this innovation on the Mountain View blog ( link here ), searched for the word chikoo which is both an exotic fruit and the name of his dog.
The search engine returns 50 personal results and 419,000 other results: in essence, Google offers Amit Singhal content from the network (for example, the definition of the fruit on wikipedia) and content shared on his Google+ profile or of users connected to him, such as photos of his dog published by himself or his wife.
Google searches through your world: and to be sure, just note that the icon with the person is highlighted.
If you prefer to view only the results from the web, without social contamination, just click the icon with the world.
Furthermore, Search Plus Your World:
– if you are looking for a person on Google, it will first suggest people of the same name from your circles and profiles of influential people on the social network;
When Amit Singhal started typing Ben… friend Ben Smith appeared as the first suggested result.
– if you are looking for a topic on Google, it will suggest you profiles and Google+ pages that are relevant and relevant to the topic you are looking for, so that you can follow them with a click and expand your circles.
When Amit Singhal searches for “music” on the right, Google suggests Google+ profiles of people with profiles who often discuss this topic, very popular with users of the social network.
What does this social evolution of research entail? What repercussions does it have on SEO?
As a first point, it should be specified that searches and results returned by Plus Your World are encrypted, protected by the SSL protocol; if on the one hand this is good for users, who will be the only ones to view the contents that concern them with the utmost respect for privacy, on the other hand the data relating to their searches cannot be captured by programs such as analytics, thus escaping very important statistics for those who work in the sector.
Furthermore (as explained above) it is true that you can switch from the social results to the usual ones of the global search by clicking on the icons, but by default for logged in users Google returns the personalized data; not everyone knows it or notices it, and therefore they will continue to browse in this way that “distorts” the serp, leaving less space for the natural results of the web, penalizing them a little.
Therefore, if you are indexing a site and would not like to be excluded from the users’ SERP Plus Your World, you will not only have to continue working to obtain a good natural positioning, but also operate on the social front: open a Google+ profile and be active on the social network, by often sharing content, it is now more essential than ever.
