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Comment by Supermighty | Hacker News Reader

G+ can't be avoided for too long. Google is using it to tie together Author Rank, which helps for SEO. If you want your content to rank higher post-Panda update you'll leverage G+.

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If that's true then G+ is more of a danger to Google than Facebook ever was. Using the index as a way to strong-arm publishers into using a half-baked Facebook clone may even work, short-term. Long-term this is one way Google can lose Search.

It is true, Eric Schmidt said: “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

I assumed you were making that quote up, but holy cow, he actually said it.

My historical love of Google has been directly proportional to my unawareness of Schmidt's privacy philosophy. The man's gone completely insane, and makes a frankly woeful spokesperson.

Eric Schmidt tanked Sun, Novell, and Google. His best CEO ability is ejecting before the crash, so his effect on Google is not yet evident.

I post links to new blog posts on G+ with a nice lede, then gently push e-mail subscription and RSS on the site. That's all G+ will get from me until it's useful for more than SEO.

Please ignore everything Schmidt says. He's creepy beyond belief.

About G+ I hope more people give it the finger so that Vic Gundotra finally understands that you can only alienate your users so much before they go somewhere else.

Right now not using G+ isn't hurting publishers. Those that do use it get a little bit, but not enough that they have to use it. Google is playing the long slow game with this. By the time everyone has to use G+ to stay relevant in the SERPs everyone will be.

Linking a profile to your web page is not the same as using the plus.google.com website.

Verifying identity is simply submitting a form to Google.

I doubt that this will work out for Google in the long term. For one there is the danger that G+ will soon be full with fake profiles created by spammers. Another thing is that coupling of G+ membership with organic ranking reminds me of Microsoft bundling IE with their OS. They leverage their monopoly in one market to take over another.

Using the dominant position of Google Search to push other Google properties, isn't this what "Don't be evil" was supposed to be about?

No, it was supposed to be a marketing slogan for idiots who think for-profit companies can "not be evil" or care about it.

Only if it harms user experience.

Which it does when it deliberately shows inferior results. See:

Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy Jan 11, 2012 at 1:58pm ET by Danny Sullivan

http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-driv...

No, I won't.

Either Google build accurate rankings, representing real web tendencies and quality, or they lose the search engine market.

There's Bing which is not half bad -- and if Google turns to this artificial G+ scheme, it would be better than Google. And the market is ripe for another newcomer...

Depends on how the execute this. If they turned it on like a switch I think it would fail. But it seems they are slowly allowing verified authors in G+ to affect search rankings. Slowly people will see this and want to get in on the action. Slowly people will migrate to G+. If you look at how Google has handled G+ you will see that is exactly what they are doing.

This is bad. Tying the worth of a website to its presence on a proprietary service, reminds me of yahoo's paid-for search directory service.

Yes. And it will ultimately sully their core product. When I type in a phrase I'm interested in how involved in Google+ the potential results pages might be, I just want the most relevant information - a Google+ affiliation is noise in that data set.

When you see someone's photo next to a search result and "by Person Name" that "by" is a link to their G+ profile. Even though the search result could be linked to a blog post on another website.

Wait.. wasn't this what the FCC was supposed to investigate? Google abusing its dominant position in one area to leverage its other products and shielding it from competition. I was aware of requiring a Google+ profile if you wanted your picture to appear next to search result, thus increasing the chances of clicks (like Ebay) but Author Rank seem like a terrible idea! Please don't mess with your core products.

This is only true for content producers. As long as the content producers use other means than G+ to publicize their content I, as a consumer, have no incentive to use G+. So to me this still seems to be a losing proposition. Consumers vastly outnumber consumers and when the producers act as consumers they are still free to use whatever they want.

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