Organic SEO is a really complicated world, and it’s rare that everyone in the SEO community points at something and says “Hey, there’s a really obvious and correct way to react to this change!” So when the top SEO specialists from around the Interwebs all agree on something, it’s time to pay close attention.
The last time there was a major consensus was when Google’s Panda update happened last year, and it was largely agreed that it was a decent upgrade for the masses that didn’t really affect us white-hat SEO types. Today, we’re just reaching a new consensus: that Google’s new Search Plus Your World is more important than we thought it might be at first.
The reason is two-fold. The first is that, when it first hit the market, Google Plus seemed more like a Facebook-wannabe than anything else — but since then, Google has added elements to the social networking bubble, including (very importantly) blogging. The second is that the size of Google Plus’ userbase is getting significant enough that Search Plus Your World is starting to become a victim of group-think.
What that means is, it’s starting to be possible to get even your best-SEO-ed Google Plus stuff shunted off of one of your Circler’s results pages because there’s enough other stuff out there that more closely matches their preferences.
So, for example, if I have an SEO tool called “Leverage”, and one of my Circlers watches the TV show “Leverage”, the chances are pretty good that I won’t show up on his results even though I’ve done my SEO and my social marketing. The competition is starting to heat up, even for Search Plus Your World results pages.
When you combine group-think with the addition of content like blogs to the equation, you’re going to very rapidly reach the point where people are going to be able to do searches without seeing anything other than the content created by them and their closest actual friends — no room for us SEO specialists to work our magic at all. That’s bad news for everyone.