What Twitter, no big announcement today? LinkedIn, Facebook and Google all had big news – especially for those of us in Ireland today:
LinkedIn is to create 100 jobs in Dublin. “The jobs, which will be available over the next 12 months, will include graduate and experienced positions, with opportunities in sales, business development, marketing, customer services, finance, HR and operations. There are already more than 15 jobs on offer today.” Read more: http://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers-centre/item/21154-linkedin-to-create-100-new/
Facebook Deals launched in Ireland Today. “Starting today, businesses in Ireland will be able to offer you Deals when you check in to their Places on Facebook. There are some great launch offers from A|Wear, AXA, Champion, Guinness Storehouse, Insomnia, Meteor, Milano and SuperValu.” Read more: http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-dublin/facebook-deals-launches-in-ireland-today/10150147347868011
Google announced it’s next stage in social search with it’s +1 button. As an SEO specialist this is the news that interests me the most. Registered users will be able to click the +1 button on search results and AdWords ads that they want to recommend to their ‘friends’. At the moment the +1 button is only being shown for a limited number of users and it will roll out across Google.com for English language users in the coming weeks.
They will also be rolling out the ability to add the +1 button to your own website. You can register to be notified when this will be available at https://services.google.com/fb/forms/plusonesignup/.
The important item for SEOs and website owners is that Google says that “We’ll also start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals we use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, including social signals from other services. For +1’s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality over time.” So we can expect many people to start ‘playing’ with the +1 button to boost rankings, but as it will depend on being a registered user, it may make it easier for Google to track and prevent serious abuse.
Will the +1 Button help Google in it’s battle with Facebook for users? Facebook is still a better interface for relating with your real friends and others with similar interests and will probably still be a better forum for finding out what your friends recommend, but Google will still be a better search engine and the +1 button may become an indicator of the results that are relevant to you — if your Google connections are relevant to you!
As I do use so many Google applications and services, I’d love to see them have more integration with my social media channels, but I’m afraid this may not be it — and I’m hoping it’s not going to cause difficulties in maintaining solid organic search results for my sites!
Read more: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/03/introducing-1-button.html
