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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Using Google+ to Appear in the Top
Results Every Time - Whiteboard Friday'

Posted by randfish
Many marketers are wondering about the effects of Google+ on search results,
and for anyone with a Google+ profile, a few personalized searches make those
effects quite apparent. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Marshall Lee the vampire
king (don't be afraid, it's just Rand) explains how having the right circlers on
Google+ can lead to top-ranked results for even the broadest of queries in their
SERPs.







Whiteboard Friday - Using Google+ to Appear in the Top Results Every Time












In case you're unfamiliar, Rand is Marshall Lee the Vampire King.


For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:



Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a spooooky Halloween edition of Whiteboard
Friday! I'm wearing some fangs this week, so if you have some trouble
understanding me, don't worry, all the text is right down there below.


I wanted to talk a little about using Google+ to appear in Google's top
results. It's really interesting what we've been observing over the last few
weeks and months of Google's development, so check this out. If I do a search
for "data science," and I'm logged into my Google+ account (which is "randfish,"
rightârandfish@gmail), I see under data science "How Moz's Data Science
Team Works." Which is pretty weird, actuallyâI think that's very strange,
because this was just posted on our Dev Blog, which isn't on our main site. It's
a subdomain, and it doesn't rank very well. If you search and you're not logged
in, you won't find it in the first 100 results at all. It's showing up here
because it's been shared by an account that I follow. It'll say, "Moz shared
this." And that's happening because of the Google+ integration.


You might say, "Okay, that's moderately interesting." I can search for very
broad things, too, like "industry survey," and getâyes, the S&P Industry
Survey of the Americas, the Standard & Poorsâbut then I get "Take the 2013
Moz Industry Survey." Whoa! Suddenly Moz is ranking all over the place. Again,
this is happening because Jonathon Colman, Dharmesh Shah, Pete Meyers, and one
other person I follow on Google+ +1'd it. Google+ biasing again.


And there's more. I tried some queries for "happy Halloween." Happy
Halloweenâthink how broad a search query that is. There was a post by
Gianluca that he had shared today with a photo, and that showed up in my
results. Consumer purchasing powerâa Google+ post by Avinash Kaushik
showed up because it was shared and I follow him. Patrick Stewart! Patrick
Stewart, I mean it's a celebrity query that gets millions of searches a month
(well, probably hundreds of thousands because Star Trek TNG hasn't been on for a
while, but in our hearts it's always been on). A post by George Takei, right? I
follow George Takei on Google+ so a post from him about Patrick Stewart is in
there (it was a delightful post, by the way).


What this means for marketers, particularly SEOs who are using search and
social and content together in their marketing, is the audience on Google+ is
becoming more and more valuable to us. These are search-savvy, tech-savvy folks
who are potentially reachable, and reachable without the classic kinds of
ranking signals. I don't have to do one tenth of the work that I had to do to
rank for these types of queries before. All I have to do is get you to follow me
on Google+.


Even if these people aren't using Google+ as a social networkâeven if
they're not visiting plus.google.com, and they're not sharing things and
following people and +1'ingâit doesn't matter, because they're still being
biased so long as they follow your account. So long as you're encircled by those
individuals, it's valuable. And by the way, this is not just happening to people
who have set up Google+ and are actually following you. It happens to anyone who
is logged into a Google account, and has connected with you over email. Meaning,
they've exchanged one or a few emails back and forthâit can't just be you
spamming them, it's got to be that you're actually receiving email from them as
well.


Gmail is another way to get this same sort of bias. You can see it in there if
you're logged into your Gmail account, and you can see "Hey, I'm not following
this person on Google+. Oh, we've exchanged emails, so they're showing me these
results higher that they've +1'd."


Google+ sharing obviously is critical because of these influential factors, to
SEOs in particular. But, be very careful, because think about thisâif I
shared every single page that I wanted to rank on just so that anyone who
followed me on Google+ would be biased to seeing it? I would soon lose
subscribers. In fact, I'm sure I would lose them very fast. People would be
like, "What the hell is Rand doing filling up my stream? None of these have
+1s." It wouldn't surprise me at all if Google is using some indication of
metrics around usage to actually determine, "Hey, wait a minute, this is getting
no +1s, no shares, no comments; why would I show this to anybody? I'm pushing it
down in the results. I'm not going to show it."


These are all things that did receive quite a lot of activity. Well, actually,
Gianluca's post hadn't received any activity yet, but it was very recent and
lots of his posts do receive activity. So, if you overshare, you have to be
carefulâI like to say I think discretion is key here. Also, even if you
don't have a Google+ audience, it doesn't matter because
influencersâpeople who do have audiences on Google+âmight be sharing
your stuff.


That's fascinating to imagine. It's almost like "Hey, I don't use Twitter, but
if I can just get someone to tweet some of this stuff for me, I know I'll get
traffic." Well, on Google+, it's not just the traffic you'll getâyou'll
also get high rankings from all of their audience. It's really remarkable.


By the wayâone thing of warning. There is a time decay on this stuff. I
don't see all of the posts that George Takei has historically made
(historically, I can barely say "historically" with these teeth)âthat he's
historically made about Patrick Stewart, I only see the ones from just recently.
So, there's a time decay factor, it looks like between a week and a month,
depending on which accounts you're following and what types of queries you're
doingâat least that's what I'm seeing in my accounts. Being aware of that
time decay means that if there's a topic that's very valuable, and you know you
have a potential social audience to reach that's either following you on Google+
or connecting with you through email, that might mean that publishing on a
regular basisâI might say "Hey, if ranking for consumer purchasing power
is really important to me, maybe I want to put up a blog post every month or two
about consumer purchasing power."


What's crazy is you don't need exact keyword matching. The post about Patrick
Stewart here did not have exact keyword matching, so this is a very broad
algorithm that's currently biasing to show these Google+ results. This is an
incredibly powerful tool for search marketers and social marketers, and I think
it's something that is going to get a lot more attention in the year to come.


With that, everyone, happy Halloween!
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