How Google Personalized Search & “Search Plus Your World” Impact Website Rankings

Google Personalized Search SEO You may have noticed that Google has introduced a new feature called “Search, Plus Your World.” What does this mean? According to Google it means that when you do a search on Google from now on you’ll “find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page.”

What does that mean for you, your website and your website’s search engine ranking?

The most immediate and obvious impact is that Google+ pages posts and shares will now receive a higher ranking than ever before. As Google explains ” if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Google is investing a lot of time, money and effort into Google+. This recent news is another step in in that direction.

Tyler Moore at SocialH writes:

This change means that it’s more important than ever for your company to have a strong presence on Google+. Because Google is returning results that have been shared on Google+, the more your content is shared means the more often it will be seen by potential users. Creating content that users will want to reshare has always been one of the main reasons businesses use social media. Google’s social network is still new, especially compared to more established sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and I think a lot of people are still figuring out how to use it. On top of that, Google+ Pages is only a couple of months old. However, creating interesting, relevant and shareable content is the real reason social media is important for SEO, and Google’s just given every SEO a big incentive to use Google+ Pages.

More than ever, creating unique, interesting and informative content that will be shared across the Internet is incredibly important to improve traffic and your search ranking. Social media marketing and having a strong presence on social networks matters a great deal as well. You’ve always needed new and interesting content if you wanted to rank highly on Google, so in that sense nothing changes, except that social sharing is now even more important than ever.

P.J. Fusco at Search Engine Watch writes:

In Google Search Plus Your World, your friends’ online experiences are more relevant to your personal search results than links and domain authority. This is a game changer from what we all knew and understood about perceived relevancy of public web search results.

If you want to get people talking about your company or your products, if you want to be shared socially on Google+ and other social networks, you’ll need a presence on these sites and you’ll need interesting content. Social media marketing, web content writing and blogging may just become more important than ever.

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