Tuesday 25 February 2014

They Owned Up: "the Economist" Uses Google+ For SEO

By Ayub Yusuf


Google Plus is Google's foray into the social network market. The network is meant to challenge the dominance of Facebook in the space. However, it still has not gained nearly the traction that Facebook enjoys. In order to force people into using the network, Google is tying it to its other products. This is happening to such a large extent that a New York Times piece recently highlighted that the Economist is using Google+ to impact its search marketing efforts.



What's not to like if you join Google+ when you are a business? You get treated like royalty with placement in the prime location in the search results; top right hand side. Normally, a business would pay through the nose for a spot like this, but Google gives it for free to lure in businesses to hop on to their service.

There are several ways that Google Plus helps in this effort. As Magee highlighted in the interview, many of the Google+ posts actually rank themselves quite highly in the search engines. This is consistent with the very noticeable way that Google ranks its own properties such a Youtube videos and Blogger blogs higher in its search results than competing properties. There are many people crying foul at this practice because it brings up serious antitrust issues.

There has been quite a lot of push-back from users it seems after Google started requiring a Google Plus account to comment on YouTube videos. Many have stopped using the service altogether to avoid the big G from tracking their whereabouts across all the Google products like Gmail, YouTube and Google+. Some just see it as a minor inconvenience and continue on.

Each of these posts points searchers to the main site, creating some impressive SEO juice. Regardless of any talk about general fairness, Google wants its properties to rank well, meaning a Google+ post is going to be seen favorably since it gives Google more publicity in addition to the company putting up that particular post. This is the loophole "The Economist" is using - pushing Google's own self interest to help rank their own posts.




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