Is 'Search Plus Your World' revolutionising the SERPs?
The news broke a couple of days ago that Google are about to begin rolling out a series of changes that will radically transform the appearance of their results pages. The change is called 'Search Plus Your World', and it integrates content that has been shared with you privately, as well as matches from the public web mixed into a single SERP.
At the moment, the changes are only going to apply to signed-in users at Google.com, who are searching in English. They will be notified that the changes have been made to their SERPs when they see a notification that looks like this:
Another feature of this update is one that members of the search engine optimisation community have been calling for, for a long time. That is the option to switch between personalised and depersonalised results with a single click. This is easily done using this button, located to the top right of the SERPs:
This is a great feature because it is making the effect of personalisation much more transparent, and allowing users to simply switch between personalised and depersonalised results gives them a level of control that was absent before 'Search Plus Your World'.
How is personalisation going to affect my SERPs?
There are several ways that personalisation is going to affect your SERPs. These include listing from the web that have been boosted because of your social (Google+) connections, listings that have been boosted because of personal behaviour, public Google+ posts and photos, and private or "limited" Google+ posts and photos. The most eye-catching of these is the final point I mentioned about private content now appearing in the SERPs. Google have provided an example of how private content will infiltrate the SERPs using a scenario where Googler, Amit Shighal, searches for 'Chikoo', which is the name of his dog, and the name of an Indian fruit. In his personalised results, the SERP would look like this:
In this example, as highlighted by the Google arrow, we can see that the result is featuring in his results despite him not sharing it publically, but instead choosing a "limited" share option. Before 'Share Plus Your World', Google wouldn't have been able to list these photos when they Singhal searched for 'Chikoo' because they weren't public, and therefore Google couldn't see them. However, it's important to remember that this privately shared content will not appear in the public SERPs, only in your personalised ones. Some have already suggested that the idea of private content appearing in the listings like it is public content is unsettling by its very nature, and it may take some getting used to. To reach these photos, he would have had to use the separate Google+ Search:
Another feature of 'Search Plus Your World' is the ability to access only content that has been shared on Google+ or Picasa. This can be done by clicking on the highlighted 'Personal Results' option that appears directly beneath the search bar:
Another new feature, that might be of particular to brands looking to Google+ for a social media marketing campaign, is the suggested 'People and Pages on Google+' that is suggested for certain queries. For example, when I search for 'Gaming', Google suggests the following people and pages:
This is a perfect example of how having an optimised Google+ profile can give your brand a fantastic opportunity to increase visibility. I'd imagine that the G+ profiles for IGN and G4 will get a lot of additional traffic through these listings, and as a result their main websites may see an increase in social network referral traffic. This should illustrate to those still undecided about creating a G+ profile for their brand, that it really does have the potential to be highly effective strategy, and it is worth adopting it early to be ahead of the game when 'Search Plus Your World' goes global.
The final feature I'll cover is the ability to quickly connect with other personal Google+ profiles in a way that is very similar to how 'Direct Connect' works for Google+ business pages, and comparable to the functionality of Facebook when you search for a person's name. So, if I wanted to search for Rand Fishkin from SEO Moz, this is how it would appear:
This makes it easier to connect with the people I follow, or am connected with through Google+, particularly because below this top listing, I can see what content they have publically shared because that might be of specific interest to me. I would also be able to see content shared in a "limited" way, if it had been specifically shared with the circle I was part of.
One of the point's I hope to cover in more detail, is how Google appear to be favouring their own product (Google+) ahead of other social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, despite them both arguably being bigger data sources. Interestingly Google have recently stated that they'd be open to collaboration with those social networks, but because they don't allow Google to crawl and index them deeply enough, their impact in the SERPs is limited. If Facebook and Twitter did allow Google to crawl them, do you think they would marginalise the impact of their own product in favour of two rivals?
In this post I've just covered the basics about how 'Search Plus You World' is changing the face of the SERPs as we traditionally know them. However, several well-respected voiced in the SEO and internet marketing industries are already questioning the ethics, and the quality of these new result pages. In the next few weeks I'll be covering this area heavily, but if you have any queries about how this might affect your social media marketing strategies, then please don't hesitate to contact Click Consult.
