One More Reason Not to Spend A Lot of Time on Google+

It’s been brought to light recently by Matt Southern from the Search Engine Journal that Google is no longer indexing Google+ pages for businesses. This is evident, according to Southern, by his testing that Google+ is no longer being included searches which would have previously returned links to Google+ business pages.

From the Search Engine Journal:

Another possible explanation is that Google is responding to the accusations of favoring its own properties in search results by, well, removing its properties from the search results.

Companies like Yelp have long been accusing Google of unfairly ranking Google+ pages ahead of their sites in local search results. The companies allege they’re losing traffic as a result of Google’s practices.

Yelp, TripAdvisor, and individual businesses, should all be happy with today’s discovery. Now, when searching for a business, I find that 9 times out of 10, a business’s own website will show up first. The company website is then followed by Yelp, TripAdvisor, Zomato, and so on. No sign of Google+ anywhere.

Google+ Can Still Be Beneficial to Your Business

There are still some benefits to having a Google+ page. The benefits are mostly related to having Google+ members “follow” your page. When you have someone following your page and the person does a search on Google, content from your Google+ page will show up. Typically, people who are followers of your page and are logged into Google/Gmail/etc. see recent posts you have made on your Google+ page.  

If you are actively publishing to your Google+ page and have a significant number of followers, you do benefit from having your content show up in search results.  

The view here that shows the green “Following” in the right hand corner of the Google search page is due to me being a follower of LeadG2 and searching for it. You can imagine the usefulness of this if people who are followers of your brand on Google+ see your results when they are doing searches vs. their competitors.  

The image below is the exact same search, but when I wasn’t logged into Google. So you can see that the LeadG2 Google+ content is no longer there.  

At LeadG2, we don’t spend a significant amount of time on posting to our Google+ page because we use the HubSpot social media publishing tool to automatically publish our blogs to the page.  But we do see some value in its use. If you have done some research to determine that your target person is using Google+ it’s worth taking a look at. We have had a recent boost in our Google+ traffic to our blogs recently and this is partially due to a growing number of followers of our Google+ pages.

Photo Credit: Robert Scoble