Google Plus was expected to hit 10 million users according to Paul Allen, Chief Revenue Officer at FamilyLink as cited in a recent post on Google+ published at Buzzom.com. That is one heck of a beta test! Google’s official position, as represented below by Google+ Product Manager Christian Oestlien, is that businesses should be patient and hold off on creating Google+ profiles for their brands, for now at least.

In the video below published by Google+ product management along with the accompanying Google+ blog post, according to Christian, the reason that Google is urging brands to exercise patience is because he states that the Google+ product team is currently focusing on user experience.

Google+ Product Manager Christian Oestlien on Current Focus of Google+ product team

The Google+ product management position makes logical sense as until user adoption reaches critical mass, Google+ relevancy to business beyond positive SEO impacts are currently unclear. That said, you can easily add a Google+ button to your website or blog without having to create a Google+ profile, just like you can add a facebook like button to a website or blog without needing a fan page. Thus eBiz ROI recommends that publishers and businesses with websites deploy the Google+ button to be able to reap the potential traffic and SEO benefits of users Google+ (aka Liking) your post. If you need help, contact us and we would be glad to assist.

According to Mashable, some significant brands are already hopping aboard including Ford, Breaking News and Mashable themselves creating Google+ profiles even against the Google advise.

As illustrated see from the following information from BrightEdge Research based on a recent survey, we can see that savvy publishers are already adopting and placing Google+ social pluggin (buttons) on their websites, probably in anticipation of broad user adoption over time, not necessarily overnight. Based on recent findings from BrightEdge Research looking at the Adoption of Social Plugins by Top Websites,

image source: Adotas: Google’s +1 Shows Impressive Pub-Adoption Rate.

it is clearly evident that while deployment of the facebook like plugin (aka Like Button) by top publishers is still by far the leader at 10.8%, recent gains by the facebook like plugin over the period show only modest growth in adoption (.3%) while Google+ with an adoption rate of 4.5% surged ahead 3 full per-centage points which represents 350% growth over their previous 1% Google+ adoption by top publishers. Who would expect anything less form a dominant player like Google? The justice department?;-) Click the image above or BrightEdge post entitled Google +1 Sees Surge in Placement on Web’s Largest Sites, but Facebook Still Dominant Social Plug-In to read more about the BridgeEdge Research findings.

To those saying that Google+ will never catch up to facebook in terms of active users, I say look at the usage data. According to latest traffic (unique site visitors/month) data from Compete.com one can imagine how Google has the reach to catch up. Can you say Google Chrome? What about Android? I realize that facebook is the Mount Everest of social networks, but Google is the Goliath of search, analytics, video ala YouTube, etc. Nuf said.

US Traffic for Google vs. Facebook Measured in Unique Visitors per Month

Google.com remains more visited in the US than facebook.com, providing them the reach they willl need to get distribution for campaigns to expand their search relationships into social. Given that Google was shut out of the facebook data that their prime search competitor, Microsoft Bing has, it will be a strong driver for Google to both increase user adoption of Google+ while using the data as a factor in their search algorithm, which I assume is a key driver for Google as a company.

eBiz ROI adoption of Google+

You might have noticed when arriving at this post that eBiz ROI has placed a Google+ button on our Internet marketing blog and a Google+ button on each blog post (see at the top of the post) by not on our business website. Yet.

eBiz ROI and our readers love to hear from other businesses and Internet marketing practitioners in terms of how they are leveraging Google+ to promote their business and build out their circles. We are also interesting in hearing about any observed impacts to the Google natural search results based on Google+ feedback and +1s (don’t you just want to say like .

Why not join the conversation and tell us what you think about Google+, how you are using it and what factors, if any, you think make Google+ something that Internet marketers should pay attention to.

Google+, Business and Beyond is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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The following How Search Works video featuring Matt Cutts, Google Search Quality Team Lead, provides an excellent overview how the Google search engine works in relatively non-technical terms. Matt specializes in search engine optimization issues and is well known in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam which impacts the relevancy of Google search results, resulting in a less positive user experience.

Matt Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google as well as webmaster issues in general, and is generally an outspoken and public face of Google. Matt Cutts is to SEO as Ben Bernake is to Wall Street.

Video Transcript – How search works, by Matt Cutts

Hi my name is Matt Cutts I’m an engineer in the Quality Group at Google and I’d like to talk today about what happens when you do a web search.

The first thing to understand is that when you do a Google search you aren’t actually searching the web. Your searching Google’s index of the web or at least as much of it as we can find.

We do this with software programs called spiders. Spiders start by fetching a few webpages and then they follow the links on those pages and fetch the pages they point to and then follow all the links on those pages and fetch the pages they link to and so on until we’ve indexed a pretty big chunk of the web. Many billions of pages stored across thousands of machines.

Now suppose I want to know how fast the cheetah can run. I type in my search, say “cheetah running speed” and hit return. Our software searches our index to find every page that includes those search terms. In this case there are hundreds of thousands of possible results.

How does Google decide which few documents I really want? By asking questions. More than 200 of them like how many times does this page contain your keywords? Do the words appear in the title? In the URL? Directly adjacent? Does the page include synonyms for those words? Is this page from a quality website or is it low quality or even spammy? What is the pages Page Rank. That is a formula invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that rates a web page’s importance by looking at how many outside links point to it and how important those links are.

Finally, we combine all those factors together to produce each pages overall score and send you back your search results about half a second after you submit your search.

At Google we take our commitment to delivering useful and impartial search results very seriously. We don’t ever accept payment add a site to our index, update it more often or improve its ranking. Let’s take a look at my search results:

Each entry includes a title, a URL, and a snippet of text to help me decide if page has what I am looking for. I also see links to similar pages, Google’s most recent stored version of that page, and related searches that I might want try next.

And sometimes, along the right and at the top of the search results are ads. We take our advertising business very seriously as well. Both our commitment to deliver the best possible audience for advertisers, and to strive to show only ads that you want to see. We are very careful to distinguish your ads from your regular search results. And we won’t show any ads at all if we think they won’t help you find the information that you’re looking for., which in this case, the cheetah’s top running speed is more than 60 mph.

Thanks for watching this How Search Works Video and I hope this made Google and search engine marketing in general, a little more understandable.

For more information, see www.google.com/howgoogleworks.

How Search Works Video by Matt Cutts of Google is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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The process of Submitting your website to Google is quite simple.

1. Navigate to the Add your URL to Google
2. Enter website address in the URL input field
3. Enter comments in the comments input field
4. Enter the optional characters in the image which is a mechanism used by Google to distinguish between sites submitted to Google and by individuals and those submitted to Google automatically through software. Note that this input field is optional
5. click the submit button

Only the top-level page of your website needs be submitted to Google and then the Google web crawler will discover linked pages that collectively comprise your website. According to Google, the comments entered in the add your URL to Google form do not affect how your page is indexed or used by Google once submitted.

If you are a procrastinator, fear not as new domains, once registered, generate what is called whois records that include the domain name and name servers which get communicated to Google who adds the new domain information to the queue of web address to crawl. That is not to say that submitting your URL won’t expedite the process getting your website listed on Google faster to bring more natural search traffic sooner.

Google does have the following disclaimer listed on the Add your URL to Google page: “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.” In my experience, it is rare that Google will exclude any unique and useful content from its database but like most things in life beyond death and taxes, nothing is guaranteed.

As the next step in managing your website positioning within Google, navigate to the Google Webmaster Central and login to learn more about tools and techniques to enhance your search positioning and Google search referral traffic.

Submitting Your Website to Google is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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backlinks

Hmmmm, this is a immersive concept and I need to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my research at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – simplified

The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The good news is that authorities trusted by people are also trusted by Google. A great example is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are authoratitive sources of information and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will send authority to your site. Another great example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely authored by by tribes of people as opposed to a single source.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your site then you receive their influence and as far as Google is concerned you become more authoritative and so the trust in your site by Google increases.

How Google determines what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and aligns with Google’s thinking of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is someone exploiting the formulae that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological asset of this period in history.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

In the same vein it’s valuable to state some ‘black hat sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

• Paid backlinks – places where people buy and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on blog pages that are just not associated to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t dumb. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s monitoring systems, specifically if it’s a brand new domain.
• Backlinks from unscrupulous sites – these are particularly henous as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but major press portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant numbers of the same article over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing go against the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future article….

The link between backlinks and Google authority is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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