When Google announced its foray into the social media world with Google+, internet marketers, online business owners, and the casual “social surfing” crowd had great expectations.
Google’s always been known as a company that delivers. Sure, they’ve had a few misses, but when they fully commit themselves to a new product, it's usually a good one.
Now, when they released Google+, there was a lot of confusion. Like Gmail and most other large Google product launches, the only people who could sign up were those with invites. This helped build up the “hype” for Google+, but it created a problem: most people didn’t have a clue what Google+ actually was.
So there was a lot of fanfare about this brand new social network, but very few people could get on and start using it.
Regardless of this problem, it does seem like Google+’s grown fairly steadily. And the proof of that is found in the Google rankings. Search for someone’s name with a Google+ profile and it’ll likely be sitting in ranks #1-#5.
In your searches, you’ve likely noticed these Google+ results popping up. And they aren’t only for personal pages. If there’s a popular Google+ post on a relevant topic to what you searched, it’ll rank well.
So this leads people to speculate. It’s only been a short time since Google+ was made available to the general public. But already, it seems to be taking over the search engine rankings, consistently ranking higher than both Facebook and Twitter.
How are they achieving these rankings so fast? Well, some believe that since Google controls the rankings, they’re manipulating them to place their websites higher. In other words, they’re cheating.
But is that really what’s going on?
NO!
And herein lies the genius of Google. Google fully understands their algorithm. While they’re not manipulating rankings to place their websites higher in the rankings, they are using the absolute BEST SEO practices possible. This makes Google+ rank incredibly well, despite its relatively new age!
So Google isn’t cheating. They aren’t manipulating. They’re simply using the same tools all internet marketers and SEO’s have at their fingertips, but they’re doing so in an incredibly efficient and purpose-driven manner.
In today’s article, we’ll be talking about exactly what Google’s doing so right, and how SEO’s can dramatically improve their rankings just by using Google+ as a model!
Internal Linking on Steroids
For quite some time now, we’ve known that Google loves internal rankings. It’s possible to dramatically increase your rankings in the search engines by simply linking between pages on your website.
Does Google+ do this?
Absolutely!
Every time you connect to someone’s “circle,” you’re linking back to Google+. And there are millions of these links being created each and every day. Google’s made it simple to get circles, which in turn, makes it simple for them to build internal links. Google’s creating an incredible amount of authority thanks to this reason, and the best part it’s happening on autopilot, thanks to users doing all the linking.
Content Galore
On Google+, if you don’t specify a post as “private,” Google will index it into the search rankings. Since most people post using the “public” setting, Google’s getting pages upon pages of fresh, indexable content each and every day.
And remember, all this content is being internally linked over and over again.
On top of this, Google+’s profiles contain a lot more content than Facebook and Twitter pages. As we’ve talked about in past articles about Google’s new post-Panda algorithm, content length matters.
Excellent On-Page Optimization
Lastly, Google has incredible on-page optimization. Whenever a Google+ result shows up on page #1 of the rankings, you can see the title and description are optimized perfectly for search engines.
Go figure – Google is the granddaddy of search engines.
Putting it All Together
It’s actually pretty simple. Google is NOT cheating. In fact, they’re not even doing anything new or revolutionary! Instead, they’re doing what most SEOs already know. They’re creating loads of fresh and unique content, optimizing it correctly, and using internal links. Thanks to the nature of Google+, though, they’re able to do this on a massive scale.
Yes, most of us internet marketers and online business owners won’t be able to do SEO on this scale. But we can know exactly how SEO’s working by looking at Google+. And so far, Google+ is doing exactly what good SEO experts have always said to do.
If you’d like more tips on how to rank well on Google, go ahead and fill out the e-mail opt-in box below. We won’t spam you, just update you whenever there’s a big change happening in the world of search.
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