Within 2 weeks of its launch Google Plus has gained 10 million users and the number now reached to 20 millions. What is more interesting is that some websites have come up with ‘exciting offers’ of ‘Google +1 for Sale!”. You can get 50 to 2000 +1 clicks for your site by spending for a good buck.

The Questions
But the questions that are abuzz on the web are -

• What is the future of SEO with Google +?
• How is it going to affect SEO?
• What features of Google Plus can benefit SEO?
• How +1 can lead to better ranking?
• How to add +1 button to my site?

The Side Effects
SEOs are concerned about how the use of Google +1 button can be manipulated and how spammers can misuse it (one case is already mentioned above). And website owners are in a hurry to embed Google +1 button in their websites.

Plus One Reporter, a Google +1 automatic link checker is already available in the market. An internet software development company has built this utility software capable of generating report on the Google +1 count for a list of URLs.

Google+ Features that can Influence SEO

Now coming back to SEO, currently, there are two features in Google Plus that might prove beneficial in terms of SEO.

+1 Button: The +1 button as Google has mentioned is a way to tell your friends and acquaintances that “you should check this out”. While you plus-one a website to help your friends to find what they are looking for the plus-oned website definitely gets an advantage with this recommendation. So far it is available as long as you are logged in to your Google account.

Sparks: The Spark shows a bunch of recent news and updates of your interest. It not only quarries the most recent updates from the web it also provides user an option to share it in his/her circle. With this feature Google again establishes the importance of freshness of content.

Unlike Facebook that emphasizes on the most recent activities and creations Google’s search engine counts the age of the domain as a ranking factor. Now Google pioneering the world of search it is quite expected that the search engine giant may try to integrate its social media recommendation with its organic searches to take online search to the next level. Though keywords will be used to perform searches but the metrics of keyword selection will see some changes.

With this new webmail service users will be able to stay connected with friends and relatives. Once you activate email notification from your account settings on Facebook you will stay updated on what’s happening on the social media site including your friends status updates, photo and video uploads and wall posts. And what is more, you don’t have to log in to comment on your friends posts. Just reply those notification mails and your comment is published on Facebook without even logging in.

Whether you want to be informed on every wall post or want a daily or weekly email digest that’s up to you. This new email feature is expected to be popular among Facebook users as it enables users accessing the social media… anywhere… anytime.

Where Goo.gl is different from the others…

Benefits of Shortening URLs

Tools such as bit.ly already give its users a host of facilities including statistics containing the total number of decoding or click on the shortened URL.  Using these utilities users get short links that are permanently redirected (301 Redirection) to a given website. Some URL shortening services offers customizing links using keywords which proves beneficial from SEO perspective as well. These utilities already provide a complete package for shortening, managing and sharing your URLs.

Where Goo.gl is different from the others…

Now the question is what extra does Google’s URL shortening service is going to offer its users? Well, Google claims goo.gl to be the simple and fastest URL shortening service and the most reliable too. Users are simply get blinded with the shortened URLs as they don’t get any clue before clicking the link that where it will redirect. But, with goo.gl you will receive warning message whenever the ‘short URL’ directs to a malware or spam site.  You need to sign in to your account to view the history of your short URLs based on the timeline. So, we expect happy and safe links sharing with goo.gl!

Here are some free tools (suggested by Google) that can be used to test and improve site speed:

• PageSpeed: Open source Firefox/Firebug add on
• YSlow: A free tool by Yahoo!
• WebPagetest: Page performance and optimization checklist

Besides, the Site Performance check in Google Webmaster console helps to find out the areas that can be improved. Many other tools and information on how to make your website faster are available at http://code.google.com/speed

The comments below the announcement show a mixed opinion about the change. Some are happy as the speed gets importance, whereas, some are concerned about the websites that contain images, videos and flash files. People have also asked how Google will take care of the sites that are slow because of the Google Analytics code snippet!

There is no reason to think that Google will not improve the algo. Let’s wait for the Speed Part II to be released!

Just think: a user runs a Google search, Google displays the results, and then when the user clicks on a link, it takes several minutes to load the page! Why should Google list such a web page that annoys its user? Logical!

Slow websites are bad for your users also. When someone with dial up connection visits your website and the page takes so much time to load, chances are high that the user will leave your website. So, you are losing visitors because your website is slow.

Google is so desperate to enhance user experience that they are going to introduce a new internet protocol, name spdy (should be pronounced as speedy) which is supposed to be many times faster than http. It’s own optical fiber based private internet is in beta or something. What else do you need? Get ready to type spdy://www.google.com/ in near future.

You simply cannot ignore social media anymore; if you do then you are going to lose something for sure. Google has integrated real time search with its web search. Logged in users can see relevant updates from their social networks.

In a video Google has described that this integration will help people find ‘What’s happening right now?’ and ‘What’s happening nearby?’ very easily. Watch the video here.

Now comes the SEO point of view: isn’t it an easy way to make it to the first page of the search engines? If your website is new chances are high that it will take some time to rank high for relevant searches; but if you have an active network, you can actually appear on the first page throughout the day. For this you have be a super-active node on various social media platforms preferably on those Google is fetching data from.

Even if someone is not getting quality traffic from social media, they can get a strong web presence by staying active on social media and networking websites. Now, how to get quality traffic from social media is a different topic; will discuss more on it later. Keep visiting us.

Ok, it is not just another social network as we have seen so far. As Google puts it – “Google Friend Connect provides a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing”. And everything is there in a small java script so no coding required.

It would integrate your friends from other networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo apart from integrating with other open social applications.

So now, you can try to connect with the end users of your website in a better way and even connect with their friends.

Google Video was a big flop and they had to buy YouTube. Now, when Yahoo has bought MyBlogLog, Google has moved forward with a highly promising network.

I agree that, Google Friend Connect is a lot different from other networks like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog – but in essence it is also a promotional network like these two. Isn’t it?

Let’s wait and watch:

Related stories from other sources:

Tech Crunch | Yahoo News | Read Write Web | Oreilly

I was searching for some linkbaiting tips and found this article “13 linkbaiting tips that may sell”. I knew it was written for article syndication.

I searched the title in Google.com as “13 linkbaiting tips that may sell” to find out how many sites syndicated that article. (There was nothing great in these articles being syndicated all over the web.)

But the interesting thing is that, Google showed the original site (outgoing links in that article were pointing to Vertical-Leap.co.uk) in the result page though that sentence (13 linkbaiting tips that may sell) was not there in that site’s home page.

That article used the following anchor texts:

SEO company, SEO content writing, search engine marketing

Among these three key phrase only ‘SEO company’ was pointing to the home page (others were pointing to the internal pages of that website).

I looked for the cached page of that site and found an interesting note by Google: “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: 13 linkbaiting tips that may sell” (highlighted in the image).

[Click to enlarge]

In fact the site is getting some rank for the keyword “linkbaiting tips” (within inverted comma) too.

So what is the big deal? I got some questions for webmasters:

• What about the duplicate content issue?
• While link building, we emphasize on the anchor text number of outgoing links, relevancy of other links etc. Now, should we also start considering the title of the page from where we are getting links! (‘13 linkbaiting tips that may sell’ is the title of most of the pages.)
• Should webmasters stop article promotion or should they start it with more energy?

Any idea?