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Google +1's Correlation with Higher Search Rankings

146 points by giorgiofontana 13y ago

muxxa 13y ago
> Add Google authorship information to your online content I can't find the reference, but I remember reading here on HN that someone investigating a large drop in traffic to pages with #1 organic rankings traced it back to the profile photo that got added to pages with authorship attribution. There didn't seem to be a traffic drop on pages with #2 or #3 etc., so the author came to the conclusion that the profile thumbnail was causing their listing to be mistaken for an ad. Anyone remember that article?
- kreitje 13y ago
  I do. I believe the person had the authorship stuff on their product pages. To me it looked like a blog post from the search result but by actually reading the headline you could see that it wasn't. Here is the article you are referencing: http://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship-decreased-our-traffic-by-90/ http://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship-decreas...
- Matt_Cutts 13y ago
  I do remember that article, and here's my debunking of that claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5793803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5793803 The short version is that the site was affected by Google's Penguin webspam algorithm. It had nothing whatsoever to do with authorship.
AznHisoka 13y ago
I think it makes sense that Google +1s is used in high search rankings. It's the one social signal they can audit to see if people are cheating on it. They own the whole Google+ social graph and can easily detect if it's being gamed. Or it can just be that the more +1's you get, the more links you get, which boosts the rankings. So it may just be an indirect correlation.
- wslh 13y ago
  No, I don't think so. Humbly, my best articles are the one with less +1s while the ones with relatively high +1s are related to my success or luck promoting them. Also I don't see a correlation in my blogs between more retweets and more Google's +1s. It is most probable because my blogs don't have many visitors and didn't cross the charm, but I expect search engines like Google to leverage the long tail instead of smashing it.
  - James_Duval 13y ago
    I tend to see negative correlation between shares on any social media platform x and any social media platform y. The audiences just differ so much that anything that'll grab the Twitter crowd will tend to put off the StumbleUpon crowd, and so on. There's some crossover between a very few platforms, e.g. posts which get a lot of InShares will also likely get Tweeted a lot. It's quite rare, though, in my experience.
buro9 13y ago
2 things: 1) I think most people suspected this, and it's not amazing. 2) Is this not an abuse of their monopoly position in search? In that, to obtain a better placement or even just retain existing placement, you would have to participate in Google+
- samspenc 13y ago
  IMHO, no. Its easier for Google to use +1s as an indicator to measure social reach since it is their own data. Contrast this to: [1] Facebook and LinkedIn: most shares/likes are private by default [2] Twitter: Google would have crawl Twitter's entire corpus and tweet stream. It could do it, but Twitter's increasingly restricting access to this data. So it makes sense from a technical perspective that Google can use only the limited information available to it in terms of social strength of an article.
- dalore 13y ago
  Do they really have a monopoly in search? Have they bought/created all the patents that stop other companies from implementing online search engines? I don't think there is a monopoly in search, look we have duckduckgo for instance. Since it's their search and their google+ why aren't they allowed to use one as metrics for the other?
  - lmm 13y ago
    They have more than 90% of the market. The fact that alternatives exist doesn't make them not a monopoly when hardly anyone is using those alternatives. See windows in the late '90s.
    - saosebastiao 13y ago
      Actually, by definition, you are wrong. And you are wrong about 90% of the market as well. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2289560/Googles-Search-Market-Share-Shoots-Back-to-67 http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2289560/Googles-Search-...
      - deleted 13y ago
wyck 13y ago
This makes sense in areas where Google+ is popular, but in North America Google+ is a empty outside online marketers and tech communities, so how can they possible rely on it as a metric.
- VLM 13y ago
  Wouldn't those two groups be the most heavy users / most interested in search results?
  - VLM 13y ago
    Not understanding why I got downvoted other than a lack of explanation. A lot of easy "tech" work honestly consists of using google to find answers for people who refuse to use google for themselves. It never fails to amaze me. I was born knowing how to change the battery in a 2nd gen Prius keychain remote? LOL no I merely use a google search because you're too lazy to do it for yourself (or learned hopelessness where they're intentionally outsourcing the labor to me and I'm being the sucker) I would imagine someone who's annual review consists of how well they've SEO'd their page will be enormously more interested in how well they're doing SEO than a kid writing an essay or a possible future customer, or really anyone else at all. Money is a powerful motivator.
  - wyck 13y ago
    In fact the opposite, Google's value is providing relevant search results for everyone, not tech savy users who already know how to navigate the net and use adblock.
- dannyr 13y ago
  Empty? I'm pretty sure you don't use Google+.
  - wyck 13y ago
    I can pick 300 random real world friends and guarantee that 99% of them never use Google+, even the ones in tech. I have an account and in 1 year I have posted 2 things to an audience of practically no one. Compared to other social metric's (facebook, twitter, etc), it's empty.
ghc 13y ago
Does this mean I have to put a +1 button on my site if I don't want it to come after all the sites that do have +1 buttons (unless I'm a canonical source like Wikipedia)? If so, it seems like a gross abuse of power on Google's part. I would imagine Facebook could file an anti-trust suit over this.
- dalore 13y ago
  I read it as having your site +1'd not having a button (but the button makes it easier for people to +1 your site).
- esmevane 13y ago
  I doubt it. Does Facebook allow Google access to the signals it would need to weigh the relevant results?
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
I think that Google is not magically adding their +1's to PageRank whilst not doing the same for Facebook likes etc. But rather that google plus has been designed by Googlers for Google's engine. As such a post on a plus account will attract percentage-wise far more +1s (same way a facebook post will get more likes). And so if you compare two posts, one on facebook, one on plus.google, and they both have the same number of backlinks (likes/+1s) then the plus post will be better SEO friendly and so outrank. The fact it out ranks so much suggests that something screwy is going on - either there is a lot of cash left on the table for SEO-friendly pages, or that something like being on the google root domain helps in ways that have not been corrected for. I would doubt if Google is out and out cheating. But a lawsuit would force them to say how facebook could up its pages... Edit: I know I'm not supposed to but really - why the down votes? I would be very surprised if Google is trying to kill the golden goose.
dynamic99 13y ago
Isn't this obvious? Google _made_ +1s (and Google+).
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  Well, no. Unless Google is shooting itself in the foot, then either the research is wrong or pages that attract +1's are hosted and linked to in more SEO friendly ways. Google is really unlikely to be blatantly and obviously fixing its rankings. That is the golden goose. everything goes away when that is shown to be true in public.
  - JDDunn9 13y ago
    When sites.google.com first came out it ranked their own pages much better than a new site (they've since turned it down a bit). Many tech reporters say the only reason they use Google+ is to post stories on there because Google will rank it more highly than their own site.
  - Ryan_Jones 13y ago
    it's really quite simple. The pages that get more +1s and likes and comments and whatever metric you want are the ones that are good. The ones that are good also get more links and other signals that are used in algorithms. The hidden middle-factor here is "quality." That, or simply: "the pages that have more +1s have them because they ranked and got more traffic. e.g. nobody's +1ing pages that they can't find."
    - andreascarpetta 13y ago
      What about purchased +1s ? https://www.seoclerks.com/categories/buy-google-plus-one https://www.seoclerks.com/categories/buy-google-plus-one
andylei 13y ago
1. the correlation is 0.3. that's not a high number. 2. the correlation for facebook likes is 0.27. that's lower, but not by much. 3. its possible the causality runs the other direction: high quality results get more +1s
- Matt_Cutts 13y ago
  Yup, I love that the correlation for "Facebook shares, like, comments" (though those are three different things) is listed as 0.03 less, even though I've pointed out multiple times that Facebook doesn't exactly make it easy for Google to crawl Facebook to see that data. Your point #3 is critical: high quality things get more +1s (and tweets, and Facebook likes or comments or shares).
  - VLM 13y ago
    Maybe rephrase "high quality things get more +1s" to "high ranking results get more +1s because they're found more often than low ranking results" This brings up the interesting question of why other social media is used less for promotion of effective pages. More zombie / spammers / scammers / PR firms manipulating facebook likes than +1s? This seems extremely likely given the known "underground" like-market and incentives WRT FB.
  - Ryan_Jones 13y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't anything under .5 considered extremely weak correlation?
    - ignostic 13y ago
      The short answer is, "no, but it depends." If sample size is large and the sample is representative of what it claims to show, .5 is very significant correlation. The .3 correlation with a large sample size means something is happening. I agree with what Matt is saying: that content that gets +1s also gets links and mentions and everything else that Google might use to calculate rankings.
    - azakai 13y ago
Matt_Cutts 13y ago
Just trying to decide the politest way to debunk the idea that more Google +1s lead to higher Google web rankings. Let's start with correlation != causation: http://xkcd.com/552/ http://xkcd.com/552/ But it would probably be better to point to this 2011 post (also from SEOMoz/Moz) from two years ago in which a similar claim was made about Facebook shares: http://moz.com/blog/does-google-use-facebook-shares-to-influence-search-rankings http://moz.com/blog/does-google-use-facebook-shares-to-influ... . From that blog post from two years ago: "One of the most interesting findings from our 2011 Ranking Factors analysis was the high correlation between Facebook shares and Google US search position." This all came to a head at the SMX Advanced search conference in 2011 where Rand Fishkin presented his claims. I did a polite debunk of the idea that Google used Facebook shares in our web ranking at the conference, leading to this section in the 2011 blog post: "Rand pointed out that Google does have some access to Facebook data overall and set up a small-scale test to determine if Google would index content that was solely shared on Facebook. To date, that page has not been indexed, despite having quite a few shares (64 according to the OpenGraph)." If you make compelling content, people will link to it, like it, share it on Facebook, +1 it, etc. But that doesn't mean that Google is using those signals in our ranking. Rather than chasing +1s of content, your time is much better spent making great content.
- johnward 13y ago
  Pointing out that Facebook likes don't increasing rankings doesn't debunk Google +1s. Obviously you know if they do or do not affect rankings. I'm not sure you would tell us if they actually were used as a signal in rankings because that would lead SEO's to focus on +1's in a way similar to what happened with pagerank. It could also lead to +1 spamming/exploiting. Not that I'm going to believe you anyway, but I just want to clear this up. Are you, Matt Cutts, saying that +1s make no difference in Google rankings?
  - Matt_Cutts 13y ago
    johnward, I know of at least one other SEO that has been doing a more rigorous study of whether more +1s lead to a higher ranking. I suspect that study might come out in the next month or two. Suffice it to say that I would be very skeptical of anyone who claimed that more +1s led to a higher search ranking in Google's web results.
nkuttler 13y ago
This post highlights some of the reasons why I don't like Google+, and dislike it even more than facebook. > Posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately I used to use RSS feeds for quick indexing. Well, I guess we all know how that turned out when G wanted more users for G+. > Add Google authorship information to your online content The technique for this really disgusted me the first time I read about it. The easy method is basically linkbaiting to G+, not to mention that no other provider of authorship info is supported. Why do we have microdata again? > Make your content easy to share on Google+ with relevant social sharing buttons Yes, no, thanks. More intel and links for G. > Completely fill out your Google+ profile with relevant and engaging information Yeah, because people should rather publish good content on G+ than their own sites. > Make your posts public Of course, you only get all the benefits if your stuff is public on G+ and generates more traffic for them. All in all I have to say well done Google. Good for you anyway. And good for people who want to hire a social media.. err.. ninja. Not so good for people who want to publish their own content on their own sites or even other social sites.
JDDunn9 13y ago
It's hard to think of what the lurking variable could be here if you want to make the argument that this is purely correlation and not causation. With Facebook likes, that could also indicate overall traffic levels or other popularity-based metrics, because everyone uses Facebook. Only the tech/news industry really uses Google+ though. So considering how few pages have a lot of +1's, this is a very high correlation. e.g. If +1's were just an indicator of # of unique linking domains, you'd expect that correlation to be much higher than +1's, since almost all sites have links but few have +1's.
skriticos2 13y ago
I have fired a quick Google search for "Google correlate". This site came up second which is high considering the first result was a product by Google called correlate I found this way that makes search data correlations. Interesting. http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/comic http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/comic
ignostic 13y ago
I have found enormously high correlations - as high as 99% in some industries - between links and brand-name searches in Google. I've also found enormously high correlations for non-commercial phrase rankings and social shares. I have used Google finance for public companies in the same industries and found correlations between sales and links to a site. I suspect you can compare almost any popularity metric and find huge correlations with other popularity metrics. Equating correlation with cause is one of the main problems I see in the modern SEO industry. Many SEOs are so obsessed with links, for example, that they have lost sight of the importance of building content, awareness, and products that real people will care about. I can't wait to see SEOs wasting their time spamming links on G+ and buying +1s after skimming this post.
portentint 13y ago
I'm pasting in a comment I wrote directly on the Moz blog. Hope that's OK: First: DON'T READ THIS ARTICLE AND START BUYING/ACCUMULATING CRAP Google +1 VOTES. That's not what Cyrus wants you to do. It's not what Moz wants you to do. And it'd be catastrophically stupid - you'll be providing direct evidence, directly to Google, that you're a spammer. On second thought - go ahead. Fewer competitors that way... The advice in the article about how to handle G+, and how to make sure you're taking advantage of the audience there, is spot-on. But the causation is definitely super-complex. With G+'s healthy but still incomplete user base, Google wouldn't use G+ as a direct SEO factor. G+ does correlate, and strongly. But I think the reasons are: Marketers know a lot about G+ and like to use it. If your content is submitted to G+, chances are you have your SEO and social ducks in a row. So the vast majority of content submitted to G+ already has a solid marketing strategy behind it. And, Google does take G+ submission, overall submission velocity, user audience and the other typical social media metrics into account when determining how much a G+1 really matters. The only reason I bring this up: So that folks reading this article don't go onto Fiverr and start buying G+ votes. Like the Facebook kerfuffle 2 years ago, whether the causal link is direct or not doesn't really matter. A legitimate, popular G+ account, and lots of legit G+1's on content, are super-valuable for SEO, social media and overall visibility. That's true even if your content has nothing to do with the marketing or other popular G+ niche industries, because there's a decent population of authoritative bloggers on G+. Getting in front of them is always good.
humanspecies 13y ago
Someone at moz is getting a raise for getting this POS spam on here.
donnie_Strompf 13y ago
"Rather than chasing +1s of content, your time is much better spent making great content." I don't get it... Are +1s not good enough of an indication that content is good? If Google is not looking at social signals how can they justify good from bad content? Natural links are just as easy to manipulate Google with as unnatural. Instead of anchoring an exact match we use a brand. Without social it makes it way too easy to game the system which some of our competitors are doing and getting away with after penguin, panda, and all the other updates. We've been finding companies that rank for "ABC" and all they do is build a bunch of blogs ("abc1.com""abc2.com""abcGreen.com""abcBlue.com" etc..) and keep building them on "free platforms" like wordpress/blogger/weebly and the other hundred sites.. Create a bunch of crap links for Google to index and rank. All google needs to see is a "natural link profile", some onsite SEO and viola. Lately we've been finding some articles that suggest changing published dates of pages/posts to get them reindexed with freshness. Some are consistently gaming Google, and the ones of us who are creating good content and get some +1s (by sharing it in relevant communities otherwise how will it be found) are going to lose to cheaters. Perhaps it's not as easy to game specific SERPs nationally. However, locally its a piece of cake. Just try looking for a locksmith, the way it's set up now the cheaters are still on top. My question to Matt Cutts is: if you were an internet marketer and you created good content that got a great amount of real interaction, and that awesome content you created is not getting any SERP love because of others who are cheating the system, what would you do? How long would you wait? and what if nothing changes after the next algorithm change?
alanh 13y ago
Ah, this may help explain why so many sites have +1 buttons while they get so little use (often on the order of 1% of the Facebook Like activity). So Google uses its search monopoly in such a way as to incentivize site operators to advertise its social network (in the form of those buttons), which encourages growth of its social network — and as a separate issue, allows them to track people, be they Google users or not, across more of the Web. No anti-trust issues here, move along... </sarcasm>
christyk 13y ago
Thanks for all the info, so Matt says Google is not considering G+ as ranking factor, I don' believe this. All social media engagement have a correlation with rankings. I think now a days correlation value of Google+ is increased(this is why they index everything ASAP). Guys Need help: We recently faced a situation where we replaced the Facebook like button with Share button from our internet marketing blog(company site/blog). Still I personally feel ‘Like’ was getting more engagement than share button, what will you advice for me. Implementing both Like & Share button is a good idea? I believe since our site only deals with particular industry i.e. Internet Marketing, less people will be sharing the blogs. We feel Facebook share is much valuable than Like, but we are confused here. Please advice.
singlesource 13y ago
Ever noticed the only people building links and discussing links are SEO’s? (Hi Matt, love your work). Expecting google to say yes or no on SEO issues is like asking your girlfriends father how to get into her pants. Unlikely to happen. G+ is a crucial tool for connecting all Google properties together and staying relevant in a mobile world. Check out this post from Ed Dale. http://www.eddale.co/apple/a-pig-just-flew-buy-and-hes-belting-out-hollywood-nights http://www.eddale.co/apple/a-pig-just-flew-buy-and-hes-belti... Then tell me it's not good business sense to give us all a gentle nudge towards G+.
igl00 13y ago
i doubt matt will ever respond right to the question
gregrysmith 13y ago
I think that seomoz is a bad website for people looking to educate theirselves, and for newbies looking to learn new marketing techniques, etc. SEOMoz is nothing more than a huge guest posting platform. No one really knows what to believe from that site. Google should regulate mass production of guest posts, such as this.
springboardseo 13y ago
How could Google possibly choose not to use +1's if they use Facebook and Twitter data as ranking signals? Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

146 points by giorgiofontana 13y ago

muxxa 13y ago

> Add Google authorship information to your online content I can't find the reference, but I remember reading here on HN that someone investigating a large drop in traffic to pages with #1 organic rankings traced it back to the profile photo that got added to pages with authorship attribution. There didn't seem to be a traffic drop on pages with #2 or #3 etc., so the author came to the conclusion that the profile thumbnail was causing their listing to be mistaken for an ad. Anyone remember that article?

kreitje 13y ago
I do. I believe the person had the authorship stuff on their product pages. To me it looked like a blog post from the search result but by actually reading the headline you could see that it wasn't. Here is the article you are referencing: http://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship-decreased-our-traffic-by-90/ http://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship-decreas...
Matt_Cutts 13y ago
I do remember that article, and here's my debunking of that claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5793803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5793803 The short version is that the site was affected by Google's Penguin webspam algorithm. It had nothing whatsoever to do with authorship.

AznHisoka 13y ago

I think it makes sense that Google +1s is used in high search rankings. It's the one social signal they can audit to see if people are cheating on it. They own the whole Google+ social graph and can easily detect if it's being gamed. Or it can just be that the more +1's you get, the more links you get, which boosts the rankings. So it may just be an indirect correlation.

wslh 13y ago
No, I don't think so. Humbly, my best articles are the one with less +1s while the ones with relatively high +1s are related to my success or luck promoting them. Also I don't see a correlation in my blogs between more retweets and more Google's +1s. It is most probable because my blogs don't have many visitors and didn't cross the charm, but I expect search engines like Google to leverage the long tail instead of smashing it.
- James_Duval 13y ago
  I tend to see negative correlation between shares on any social media platform x and any social media platform y. The audiences just differ so much that anything that'll grab the Twitter crowd will tend to put off the StumbleUpon crowd, and so on. There's some crossover between a very few platforms, e.g. posts which get a lot of InShares will also likely get Tweeted a lot. It's quite rare, though, in my experience.

buro9 13y ago

2 things: 1) I think most people suspected this, and it's not amazing. 2) Is this not an abuse of their monopoly position in search? In that, to obtain a better placement or even just retain existing placement, you would have to participate in Google+

samspenc 13y ago
IMHO, no. Its easier for Google to use +1s as an indicator to measure social reach since it is their own data. Contrast this to: [1] Facebook and LinkedIn: most shares/likes are private by default [2] Twitter: Google would have crawl Twitter's entire corpus and tweet stream. It could do it, but Twitter's increasingly restricting access to this data. So it makes sense from a technical perspective that Google can use only the limited information available to it in terms of social strength of an article.
dalore 13y ago
Do they really have a monopoly in search? Have they bought/created all the patents that stop other companies from implementing online search engines? I don't think there is a monopoly in search, look we have duckduckgo for instance. Since it's their search and their google+ why aren't they allowed to use one as metrics for the other?
- lmm 13y ago
  They have more than 90% of the market. The fact that alternatives exist doesn't make them not a monopoly when hardly anyone is using those alternatives. See windows in the late '90s.
  - saosebastiao 13y ago
    Actually, by definition, you are wrong. And you are wrong about 90% of the market as well. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2289560/Googles-Search-Market-Share-Shoots-Back-to-67 http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2289560/Googles-Search-...
    - deleted 13y ago

wyck 13y ago

This makes sense in areas where Google+ is popular, but in North America Google+ is a empty outside online marketers and tech communities, so how can they possible rely on it as a metric.

VLM 13y ago
Wouldn't those two groups be the most heavy users / most interested in search results?
- VLM 13y ago
  Not understanding why I got downvoted other than a lack of explanation. A lot of easy "tech" work honestly consists of using google to find answers for people who refuse to use google for themselves. It never fails to amaze me. I was born knowing how to change the battery in a 2nd gen Prius keychain remote? LOL no I merely use a google search because you're too lazy to do it for yourself (or learned hopelessness where they're intentionally outsourcing the labor to me and I'm being the sucker) I would imagine someone who's annual review consists of how well they've SEO'd their page will be enormously more interested in how well they're doing SEO than a kid writing an essay or a possible future customer, or really anyone else at all. Money is a powerful motivator.
- wyck 13y ago
  In fact the opposite, Google's value is providing relevant search results for everyone, not tech savy users who already know how to navigate the net and use adblock.
dannyr 13y ago
Empty? I'm pretty sure you don't use Google+.
- wyck 13y ago
  I can pick 300 random real world friends and guarantee that 99% of them never use Google+, even the ones in tech. I have an account and in 1 year I have posted 2 things to an audience of practically no one. Compared to other social metric's (facebook, twitter, etc), it's empty.

ghc 13y ago

Does this mean I have to put a +1 button on my site if I don't want it to come after all the sites that do have +1 buttons (unless I'm a canonical source like Wikipedia)? If so, it seems like a gross abuse of power on Google's part. I would imagine Facebook could file an anti-trust suit over this.

dalore 13y ago
I read it as having your site +1'd not having a button (but the button makes it easier for people to +1 your site).
esmevane 13y ago
I doubt it. Does Facebook allow Google access to the signals it would need to weigh the relevant results?

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

I think that Google is not magically adding their +1's to PageRank whilst not doing the same for Facebook likes etc. But rather that google plus has been designed by Googlers for Google's engine. As such a post on a plus account will attract percentage-wise far more +1s (same way a facebook post will get more likes). And so if you compare two posts, one on facebook, one on plus.google, and they both have the same number of backlinks (likes/+1s) then the plus post will be better SEO friendly and so outrank. The fact it out ranks so much suggests that something screwy is going on - either there is a lot of cash left on the table for SEO-friendly pages, or that something like being on the google root domain helps in ways that have not been corrected for. I would doubt if Google is out and out cheating. But a lawsuit would force them to say how facebook could up its pages... Edit: I know I'm not supposed to but really - why the down votes? I would be very surprised if Google is trying to kill the golden goose.

dynamic99 13y ago

Isn't this obvious? Google _made_ +1s (and Google+).

lifeisstillgood 13y ago
Well, no. Unless Google is shooting itself in the foot, then either the research is wrong or pages that attract +1's are hosted and linked to in more SEO friendly ways. Google is really unlikely to be blatantly and obviously fixing its rankings. That is the golden goose. everything goes away when that is shown to be true in public.
- JDDunn9 13y ago
  When sites.google.com first came out it ranked their own pages much better than a new site (they've since turned it down a bit). Many tech reporters say the only reason they use Google+ is to post stories on there because Google will rank it more highly than their own site.
- Ryan_Jones 13y ago
  it's really quite simple. The pages that get more +1s and likes and comments and whatever metric you want are the ones that are good. The ones that are good also get more links and other signals that are used in algorithms. The hidden middle-factor here is "quality." That, or simply: "the pages that have more +1s have them because they ranked and got more traffic. e.g. nobody's +1ing pages that they can't find."
  - andreascarpetta 13y ago
    What about purchased +1s ? https://www.seoclerks.com/categories/buy-google-plus-one https://www.seoclerks.com/categories/buy-google-plus-one

andylei 13y ago

1. the correlation is 0.3. that's not a high number. 2. the correlation for facebook likes is 0.27. that's lower, but not by much. 3. its possible the causality runs the other direction: high quality results get more +1s

Matt_Cutts 13y ago
Yup, I love that the correlation for "Facebook shares, like, comments" (though those are three different things) is listed as 0.03 less, even though I've pointed out multiple times that Facebook doesn't exactly make it easy for Google to crawl Facebook to see that data. Your point #3 is critical: high quality things get more +1s (and tweets, and Facebook likes or comments or shares).
- VLM 13y ago
  Maybe rephrase "high quality things get more +1s" to "high ranking results get more +1s because they're found more often than low ranking results" This brings up the interesting question of why other social media is used less for promotion of effective pages. More zombie / spammers / scammers / PR firms manipulating facebook likes than +1s? This seems extremely likely given the known "underground" like-market and incentives WRT FB.
- Ryan_Jones 13y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't anything under .5 considered extremely weak correlation?
  - ignostic 13y ago
    The short answer is, "no, but it depends." If sample size is large and the sample is representative of what it claims to show, .5 is very significant correlation. The .3 correlation with a large sample size means something is happening. I agree with what Matt is saying: that content that gets +1s also gets links and mentions and everything else that Google might use to calculate rankings.
  - azakai 13y ago

Matt_Cutts 13y ago

Just trying to decide the politest way to debunk the idea that more Google +1s lead to higher Google web rankings. Let's start with correlation != causation: http://xkcd.com/552/ http://xkcd.com/552/ But it would probably be better to point to this 2011 post (also from SEOMoz/Moz) from two years ago in which a similar claim was made about Facebook shares: http://moz.com/blog/does-google-use-facebook-shares-to-influence-search-rankings http://moz.com/blog/does-google-use-facebook-shares-to-influ... . From that blog post from two years ago: "One of the most interesting findings from our 2011 Ranking Factors analysis was the high correlation between Facebook shares and Google US search position." This all came to a head at the SMX Advanced search conference in 2011 where Rand Fishkin presented his claims. I did a polite debunk of the idea that Google used Facebook shares in our web ranking at the conference, leading to this section in the 2011 blog post: "Rand pointed out that Google does have some access to Facebook data overall and set up a small-scale test to determine if Google would index content that was solely shared on Facebook. To date, that page has not been indexed, despite having quite a few shares (64 according to the OpenGraph)." If you make compelling content, people will link to it, like it, share it on Facebook, +1 it, etc. But that doesn't mean that Google is using those signals in our ranking. Rather than chasing +1s of content, your time is much better spent making great content.

johnward 13y ago
Pointing out that Facebook likes don't increasing rankings doesn't debunk Google +1s. Obviously you know if they do or do not affect rankings. I'm not sure you would tell us if they actually were used as a signal in rankings because that would lead SEO's to focus on +1's in a way similar to what happened with pagerank. It could also lead to +1 spamming/exploiting. Not that I'm going to believe you anyway, but I just want to clear this up. Are you, Matt Cutts, saying that +1s make no difference in Google rankings?
- Matt_Cutts 13y ago
  johnward, I know of at least one other SEO that has been doing a more rigorous study of whether more +1s lead to a higher ranking. I suspect that study might come out in the next month or two. Suffice it to say that I would be very skeptical of anyone who claimed that more +1s led to a higher search ranking in Google's web results.

nkuttler 13y ago

This post highlights some of the reasons why I don't like Google+, and dislike it even more than facebook. > Posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately I used to use RSS feeds for quick indexing. Well, I guess we all know how that turned out when G wanted more users for G+. > Add Google authorship information to your online content The technique for this really disgusted me the first time I read about it. The easy method is basically linkbaiting to G+, not to mention that no other provider of authorship info is supported. Why do we have microdata again? > Make your content easy to share on Google+ with relevant social sharing buttons Yes, no, thanks. More intel and links for G. > Completely fill out your Google+ profile with relevant and engaging information Yeah, because people should rather publish good content on G+ than their own sites. > Make your posts public Of course, you only get all the benefits if your stuff is public on G+ and generates more traffic for them. All in all I have to say well done Google. Good for you anyway. And good for people who want to hire a social media.. err.. ninja. Not so good for people who want to publish their own content on their own sites or even other social sites.

JDDunn9 13y ago

It's hard to think of what the lurking variable could be here if you want to make the argument that this is purely correlation and not causation. With Facebook likes, that could also indicate overall traffic levels or other popularity-based metrics, because everyone uses Facebook. Only the tech/news industry really uses Google+ though. So considering how few pages have a lot of +1's, this is a very high correlation. e.g. If +1's were just an indicator of # of unique linking domains, you'd expect that correlation to be much higher than +1's, since almost all sites have links but few have +1's.

skriticos2 13y ago

I have fired a quick Google search for "Google correlate". This site came up second which is high considering the first result was a product by Google called correlate I found this way that makes search data correlations. Interesting. http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/comic http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/comic

ignostic 13y ago

I have found enormously high correlations - as high as 99% in some industries - between links and brand-name searches in Google. I've also found enormously high correlations for non-commercial phrase rankings and social shares. I have used Google finance for public companies in the same industries and found correlations between sales and links to a site. I suspect you can compare almost any popularity metric and find huge correlations with other popularity metrics. Equating correlation with cause is one of the main problems I see in the modern SEO industry. Many SEOs are so obsessed with links, for example, that they have lost sight of the importance of building content, awareness, and products that real people will care about. I can't wait to see SEOs wasting their time spamming links on G+ and buying +1s after skimming this post.

portentint 13y ago

I'm pasting in a comment I wrote directly on the Moz blog. Hope that's OK: First: DON'T READ THIS ARTICLE AND START BUYING/ACCUMULATING CRAP Google +1 VOTES. That's not what Cyrus wants you to do. It's not what Moz wants you to do. And it'd be catastrophically stupid - you'll be providing direct evidence, directly to Google, that you're a spammer. On second thought - go ahead. Fewer competitors that way... The advice in the article about how to handle G+, and how to make sure you're taking advantage of the audience there, is spot-on. But the causation is definitely super-complex. With G+'s healthy but still incomplete user base, Google wouldn't use G+ as a direct SEO factor. G+ does correlate, and strongly. But I think the reasons are: Marketers know a lot about G+ and like to use it. If your content is submitted to G+, chances are you have your SEO and social ducks in a row. So the vast majority of content submitted to G+ already has a solid marketing strategy behind it. And, Google does take G+ submission, overall submission velocity, user audience and the other typical social media metrics into account when determining how much a G+1 really matters. The only reason I bring this up: So that folks reading this article don't go onto Fiverr and start buying G+ votes. Like the Facebook kerfuffle 2 years ago, whether the causal link is direct or not doesn't really matter. A legitimate, popular G+ account, and lots of legit G+1's on content, are super-valuable for SEO, social media and overall visibility. That's true even if your content has nothing to do with the marketing or other popular G+ niche industries, because there's a decent population of authoritative bloggers on G+. Getting in front of them is always good.

humanspecies 13y ago

Someone at moz is getting a raise for getting this POS spam on here.

donnie_Strompf 13y ago

"Rather than chasing +1s of content, your time is much better spent making great content." I don't get it... Are +1s not good enough of an indication that content is good? If Google is not looking at social signals how can they justify good from bad content? Natural links are just as easy to manipulate Google with as unnatural. Instead of anchoring an exact match we use a brand. Without social it makes it way too easy to game the system which some of our competitors are doing and getting away with after penguin, panda, and all the other updates. We've been finding companies that rank for "ABC" and all they do is build a bunch of blogs ("abc1.com""abc2.com""abcGreen.com""abcBlue.com" etc..) and keep building them on "free platforms" like wordpress/blogger/weebly and the other hundred sites.. Create a bunch of crap links for Google to index and rank. All google needs to see is a "natural link profile", some onsite SEO and viola. Lately we've been finding some articles that suggest changing published dates of pages/posts to get them reindexed with freshness. Some are consistently gaming Google, and the ones of us who are creating good content and get some +1s (by sharing it in relevant communities otherwise how will it be found) are going to lose to cheaters. Perhaps it's not as easy to game specific SERPs nationally. However, locally its a piece of cake. Just try looking for a locksmith, the way it's set up now the cheaters are still on top. My question to Matt Cutts is: if you were an internet marketer and you created good content that got a great amount of real interaction, and that awesome content you created is not getting any SERP love because of others who are cheating the system, what would you do? How long would you wait? and what if nothing changes after the next algorithm change?

alanh 13y ago

Ah, this may help explain why so many sites have +1 buttons while they get so little use (often on the order of 1% of the Facebook Like activity). So Google uses its search monopoly in such a way as to incentivize site operators to advertise its social network (in the form of those buttons), which encourages growth of its social network — and as a separate issue, allows them to track people, be they Google users or not, across more of the Web. No anti-trust issues here, move along... </sarcasm>

christyk 13y ago

Thanks for all the info, so Matt says Google is not considering G+ as ranking factor, I don' believe this. All social media engagement have a correlation with rankings. I think now a days correlation value of Google+ is increased(this is why they index everything ASAP). Guys Need help: We recently faced a situation where we replaced the Facebook like button with Share button from our internet marketing blog(company site/blog). Still I personally feel ‘Like’ was getting more engagement than share button, what will you advice for me. Implementing both Like & Share button is a good idea? I believe since our site only deals with particular industry i.e. Internet Marketing, less people will be sharing the blogs. We feel Facebook share is much valuable than Like, but we are confused here. Please advice.

singlesource 13y ago

Ever noticed the only people building links and discussing links are SEO’s? (Hi Matt, love your work). Expecting google to say yes or no on SEO issues is like asking your girlfriends father how to get into her pants. Unlikely to happen. G+ is a crucial tool for connecting all Google properties together and staying relevant in a mobile world. Check out this post from Ed Dale. http://www.eddale.co/apple/a-pig-just-flew-buy-and-hes-belting-out-hollywood-nights http://www.eddale.co/apple/a-pig-just-flew-buy-and-hes-belti... Then tell me it's not good business sense to give us all a gentle nudge towards G+.

igl00 13y ago

i doubt matt will ever respond right to the question

gregrysmith 13y ago

I think that seomoz is a bad website for people looking to educate theirselves, and for newbies looking to learn new marketing techniques, etc. SEOMoz is nothing more than a huge guest posting platform. No one really knows what to believe from that site. Google should regulate mass production of guest posts, such as this.

springboardseo 13y ago

How could Google possibly choose not to use +1's if they use Facebook and Twitter data as ranking signals? Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4

deleted 13y ago

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