Now this is the first time we have talked about Google+ on our blog so I will give you a brief run down of where we are.

So Google are taking another punt at becoming a social media superpower, let’s hope for their sake it pays off and has more success than Buzz! Anyway, we are seeing a hybrid between Facebook and Twitter. You can follow anyone and anyone can follow you but you don’t have to be mutual friends like you would on Facebook it is more of a Twitter way of “friending”. The major selling point that Google have gone for is a simple usability and fantastic privacy settings and I have to say, they have done a fantastic job of it. But before you run off to sign up, it is currently invite only and there is a distinct lack of business pages. This is because currently its still in testing so only the likes of Ford and Mashable have pages.

It is now becoming clear though that Google+ can help your rankings, the basic concept is around social search. Google+ has a “like” feature called +1, this can be done on any page that has the button embedded in it. In this sense it is similar to Facebook, however Goolge+ is of course owned by the biggest search engine in the world and what sense would it make if the giant didn’t incorporate their +1s into the search algorithm? None. Which is exactly why they have.

From what we have seen so far is that as soon as someone you follow on Google+ +1s a page then that will show up for you on the first page for any related search. An example of this is a search for “search news” returns the top news sites on the first page but also as I follow Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land and he has shared their page it comes up on page 1 with his endorsement shown below.

The search term was "search news"

It will be very interesting to see if +1s from non friends will affect the rankings. I think it is a given that they will affect the rankings but the interesting part will be how big the effect actually is. What do you think and are you on Google+ yet?