Is Google Turning Google+ Into A Huge Identity Verification Network?
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is due to release his
book “The New Digital Age” on April 23rd and as usual he is
being as outspoken as ever and excerpts from the book obtained by The Wall Street Journal have revealed information that SEO’s should be taking notice of.
The excerpt says that within search results on Google, information that is linked to verified online profiles will have a higher ranking than content that doesn’t have verification at all.
Google introduced authorship markup in 2011 and announced that they were looking into ways to use it in highlighting authors and using it in context with serp results. In my opinion this is quite a clever tactic from Google to encourage people to use Google+ as in all honesty it didn’t exactly take off the way Google wanted it too so now they have turned it essentially into an Identity Verification Network.
What concerns me most about this is the privacy issues that it will flag up. What this essentially means is that in the future websites not linked to a Google+ account won’t rank as high as ones that are. For instance if you own a blog that you write on and prefer to remain anonymous your blog will not rank as high as one that is linked to a Google+ profile and with privacy being a big issue in this day and age Eric Schmidt has essentially predicted that online privacy will cease to exist online in coming years because Governments will eventually find it too big a risk to have people anonymous and unverified online. So is Google jumping ahead of the game here and turning Google+ into the internet’s biggest Identity Verification Network? Only time will tell.
Will you be picking up a copy of Eric Schmidt’s The New Digital Age? Just from that excerpt I certainly will be as I’m interested in what other Google secrets he is willing to spill and if you’re an SEO then you should be too!
February 12th, 2013
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