We have suspected that Google killed its Plus operator for a reason.
The Plus Came Back came back the very next day (almost), and in a very clever way:
- Anyone can create a Google+ business page here: https://plus.google.com/pages/create (here’s ours).
- When a search on Google starts with a + it will search those pages on Google+. This type of search is called Direct Connect; it doesn’t require crawling and is easy for Google to implement for the simple reason that Google hosts these pages itself.
Only a few of those searches work at the time of this post (like +google and +pepsi) but this is going to change soon!
Here are some consequences:
- This is a serious threat for Twitter and for Facebook business pages.
- Brand names become very important for all, much smaller players than Pepsi included. SEO converts into brand names competition.
Pretty interesting!
Comments 3
People tend to forget that most people use search engines as their first resort for any information retrival. Very rarely they would directly go to social media. Google surely knows this fact and sticking to their basics while enhancing social media tool too. On the other hand Facebook is not at all searchable nor SEO-centric.
Sarang,
Yes, I agree!
So right now (or soon) Google will show the page on Google+ if you put the “+” in front of a word. My prediction that what will follow is a mix of results from Google+ pages and other pages even if you do ‘not’ use the + in the search string.
What that means is that it becomes critical for businesses to have pages on Google+ and perhaps also claim keyword territory by creating more pages – just to have some control over the keywords that matter.
I think that this will affect SEO and SEM in major ways.
Thanks for this information Irina. Very useful 🙂 Helps clear up my confusion.
Sneaky of them to use it for Google+