IsaGeeks

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Today, Google announced Search Plus – a search option that essentially ties your Google Plus world together with your search rankings.

For months I’ve been preaching the word of Google Plus, and a lot of you have come to the search giant’s social network to see what was up. Given how new this site was, and how enormous Facebook already is, a lot of people wondered, “why should I care?”

So now Google has give people a great reason to care: When you go searching for information, you can now alter your results to reflect what your social circle is talking about. Traditional Google results – which are still available – only show what their algorithm says is the best result, and only looking at websites.

Now user data from their social network will feed results as well. This means if you have something you want to promote – which we all do – posting this to Google Plus, and having a social circle capable of seeing it, just became that much more important.

Since this was only announced today, it isn’t available to everyone just yet. Roll-outs of new Google products typically take a day or two, depending on where you are and the order in which Google updates their servers. So if you Google something in the next few days and see this symbol…

…you can see what the fuss is all about.

Going forward, this is going to mean some interesting changes in how you approach search marketing AND social media. For example, if one person has a website that has done well in search for some time, but never bothered to create a social following, that person could get trumped by their competitor who has been a social butterfly on Google Plus for the last year. It won’t just be because someone posted all about their business on G+ either – this update will incorporate everything other people have posted about that business as well.

Or not. The important thing to remember with all of this is that Google is still competing with Facebook. Integrating themselves into their other product – the greatest information indexing tool ever known to man, also known as the Google search engine – is their attempt to increase the visibility and importance of their own social network. It is entirely possible this just won’t work, and Facebook will continue to be the place you have to be.

However, even if only a few people jump at this opportunity to use Google Plus to increase their visibility in Google Search, those people will now be given a massive leg up on their competition.