Oct 11
17
Google Plus struggles as a Social Media button so far
Of course, by now you’ve probably heard the buzz surrounding Google Plus, Google’s attempt at competing with Twitter and Facebook on the social media interaction sphere. Perhaps Google should have considered advancing their search engine algorithm instead.
So, what’s the problem with Google Plus? Well, it’s very simple. Most people trust Google with their Gmail and nothing else. Why? Because Google has been in the limelight about personal data towers offshore and arguably unethical tactics to track what you are doing online.
Recently, the Federal Trade Commission announced a probe to dig deeper into Google’s practices involving search engine rankings, docking websites, and replacing competitor websites with partner websites instead. Panda, the name of Google’s “new” algorithm, has been the cover for these practices.
One user on Facebook posted the day of Google’s release of Plus, the following statement. “Google plus, WTF is this?” I think much of the world feels this sentiment. What makes Google a social network all of a sudden? The main reason seems to be that Google wants to move into a new market that has been so successful for Facebook and Twitter, social media.
Another person, a webmaster, offered feedback on his experience implementing the Google Plus button on his site. “At first, it looks like it might help your Google SEO ranking and that people would click it, but after months of implementation and use of Google Plus on my site spanning thousands of unique visitors, not a single Google Plus click.”
Aside from all of this, Google Plus doesn’t validate to W3C standards for most document types including 1.0 transitional and strict with multiple errors. From Google’s own Matt Cutts, he dismisses this saying, “Google doesn’t factor validation into search rankings.” Interesting, because coming from Bing and Yahoo, SEOs get the opposite feedback regarding validation and search engine optimization.
Google is making it very difficult to Google SEO these days and they are on the down-swing in terms of search engine optimization prevalence. As I’ve said earlier, I no longer use Google for search because the results are too biased in favor of what Google wants to show up instead of what should. As for the Google Plus button and SEO, it remains to be seen if people will embrace it like Facebook Like and Twitter Follow buttons as the user base for Google Plus grows larger by the minute.
