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Comment by Matt_Cutts | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I may be misunderstanding the basics, but the article implies that putting a post onto plus gives you a "perfect" page for SEO. Which means that any links to it will raise it's score more than any other page hosted anywhere else.

(They fail to follow through with posts on G+ are naturally likely to get more +1s than likes, thus presumably debunking the whole correlation issue like you say. But anyway)

So my takeaway (which I am not sure if you are challenging) is that posts on plus.google did better than a presumably control sample on facebook - and the article incorrectly ascribes this to +1s. You seem to be saying, yes it did do better but its not because of +1s, its just better. But is it better content or is it better SEO-ness of the page.

Thats the part I would like to see these studies show - how they manage the control portion. How they control for quality of the content? Because if posting the same content on G+ and on a.n.other site gets you significantly more pagerank, then its really hard to argue not to do that.

(I quite accept the "its not +1's goddammit" argument)

I notice that you avoided answering the direct question…

I believe he answered the question in the original comment.

"Are you, Matt Cutts, saying that +1s make no difference in Google rankings?"

I don't think he answered it. He basically avoided the question as expected. Not that I have anything against Cutts. There are probably things he can and cannot say or maybe he doesn't know.

I believe that people that want to avoid a question do best to answer it using terminology which can be interpreted in many ways. Politicians have been known to do this.

That being said, he probably answered the question as well as he can or wants to. It's pointless to nitpick.

Agreed - perhaps he could have used more explicit language but, as you rightly said, I think he had answered that question already. I know he's public enemy #1 amongst some SEOs but people should stop being so rude to the guy!

I don't know if your comment is directed at me, but I don't feel I was rude to him at all. I do see a lot of hate for Cutts from SEOs, but they hate Google anyway. Cutts is just a face to Google that they can focus on.

Not you to be fair - but a fair few other people are.

"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."

We can paraphrase that to: "Yes. I am saying that +1s make no difference in Google rankings."

The wonderful thing about the English language is that there are often many ways of saying the same thing.

But that is not saying the same thing. Your interpretation of it is "Yes. I am saying that +1s make no difference in Google rankings." but that is not what cutts said. His answer leaves it up to your interpretation. He could be saying "people who say +1s have an effect have no way of knowing that for sure" because we don't have access to their algorithms.

You are asking the wrong question. The question should be "Matt, does google treat google+ mentions any differently than other nofollowed links on the interweb? If yes, how."

It's a conspiracy!

Matt - thanks for taking the time to respond here.

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