Google Plus ~
The definition of a social layer.

Looking for a fringe benefit.

Most people don’t understand search and they really don’t get Google Plus.

Most of us think that Google is called a search engine because people go there to search for something, whereas the truth is —
Google do the real searching.

The company spend all day, night and day, every day, searching for clues as to who we are and what we do. It’s forever looking for these answers.

The more certain it is with regard to these answers the higher it will place us in it’s lists of search results.

It’s constantly looking to validate us, our websites and the content that we produce.

So how does it do this?

Well it does this in two ways.
There are the tried and tested, page methods. The classic SEO side of things. Domain name and age, page titles, keyword density, recent activity, back links, etc. Each attain a score. High scores are good, low scores are bad.

The thing is, a lot of people have learned the ‘science’ behind SEO and they just knock out websites and pages that fit the Google bill of health and consiquently get a high score.

Google knows this and has devalued this SEO “page” ranking accordingly.

So it developed a new way to rate our offerings.
Instead of trying to rank webpages for us, it started to look at how we, as internet users, as real people, rank content ourselves.

It launched Google Plus.

Most internet users see G+ as a Facebook wannabe, just another social media platform, but Google themselves always describe G+ as a social layer.

I have to say that I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what they meant by that (maybe because I’m one of the fools that saw it as a FB clone) and it was some time before I saw the light.

So, what’s a social layer?

Social ~ Adjective ~ Relating to or designed for activities in which people meet each other for pleasure.

If you use Google Plus you can share just about anything on the web. You can post text, photos, links, videos — even events.
You yourself and others can engage with these posts on various levels.
You can plus one something (like a Facebook like), you can share posts and you can comment on a post too if you wish. You can also follow individuals and business pages.

Then there’s the layer part.

Layer ~ Adjective ~ A level of seniority in the hierarchy of an organization.

Suppose I write and publish an article on social marketing to my site. Let’s say Google reads it and attributes an on page score. Job done. That’s the old school SEO bit done.

Now let’s suppose that someone picks up this same article and posts the link on Google plus. Maybe some people give it some Plus Ones (+1), others share it.

Some comment with the likes of “Great article”.

Some share it to some social marketing communities within G+, more people comment, I answer some of these comments and discussions ensue, some community members start to follow me. Maybe one or two social marketing authority figures share the article within their feeds.

Google has put itself in a position to access all of these social signals and attribute various scores to each of them.

Maybe a plus one gets one point (d’oh), maybe a share gets 2 points, maybe a comment gets 3 points? Maybe community engagement from my peers gets me bonus points?
Perhaps it notices that I spend my time in related communities and so it ticks a box for that behaviour too. It’s likely that it builds a tag cloud associated with my social activity and this cloud contributes to it’s knowledge graph regarding me and my business.

For years Google has been employing complex algorithms to rank us, so you know damn well that it can recognise simple phrases like “Great article” and “Thanks for sharing” in the comments section of it’s own platform.

Think about all of these indicators for a moment.

Now some posts can be deemed to be better than others. Some score high. Some score low. Some companies are accruing really big scores ~ Post on post.
This scoring is being carried out by people, not machine.