Will Google +1s Become the New Backlink?
Last week, I told you about Google’s +1 results showing up in your organic search pages. Called “Search Plus Your World” or SPEW, you have probably seen these results showing up already in some of your searches.
As you may know, I live in Florida, so I just did a quick search for “beaches,” for the heck of it, and look what came up at the bottom of my page:
And look at the number of the listings — 11 and 12. I did other searches for “pizza restaurants” and got a tons of local listings at the top of my page, a few organic listings, and a couple of social listings near the bottom, including one from my old friend Tim Linden, talking about list building and how it relates to pizza. Not at all a pizza restaurant, but you see that these local and SPEW results are starting to dominate in some searches.
So, what’s that mean to your business in search?
I means that to rank for organic search for some terms, like pizza, for example, is going to be near to impossible. Don’t even try. It was hard enough before but now, with all of these social and local results on the page, it’s going to be much worse. And that’s true with any local business tied to the term or any current event or whatever that’s turning people on. You’re going to get Places results, Plus results, and we’re already getting You Tube results. Will organic search even live?
A couple of years back, I mentioned that traditional search as we know it would be going away in favor of what the people want. Social media was just coming on strong, and it occurred to me then that people, not algorithms would have more say about what results showed up when we did a search. It’s happening.
(Hehe… social search and duplicate content bad… I’m 2 for 2 in my predictions.) 
But Google may not be 100% committed, either. Will they take the social results father down the page because people (mainly SEOs) were complaining about many terms where organic search just seems to have taken a back seat? Not sure. But above is a case where there were 12 results on my page, rather than the standard 10.
So, what to do? Do you work at getting those +1s?
I’d say yes, especially if you’re a local business wanting to be at the top of search. You want that “A” position in Google places and you want your place of business showing up somewhere on page one, hopefully closer to the top.
But here’s the thing. None of this is proven to be helpful just yet. If social results are going to be relegated to the bottom of each search results page, is it really worth busting your hump to get them?
Well, it’s always good to be on page one, but better to be at the top of page one. Do some of this and some of that, and get as many +1s as you can without concentrating all of your time and effort and you should fare well. It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out over the coming weeks and months, won’t it?
What do you think?
