Google+ Shorter Profile and the Importance of Social

We’re strong believers in social media, so when Google+ opened its doors to business we made sure that we got a page.

But up until a few weeks ago the URLs for accessing most business pages were long and not at all memorable. A bit like an IP address, it was a long string of numbers and it’s unlikely anyone would ever remember it (that’s why using domains instead of IP addresses makes so much sense 🙂 )

Fortunately Google started rolling out shorter and more memorable URLs for a select number of users and businesses. We were one of them!

So now you can get to us on Google+ using the much simpler address https://plus.google.com/+blacknight

If you haven’t got a short profile URL then check out their FAQ here. From our experience getting the profile URL we wanted was pretty easy, though we had to request a reconsideration to get it 🙂

So why would any of you care about “ocial”?

Over the last few months Google has been making a lot of changes to how it ranks websites in its search results. Here at Blacknight we aren’t SEO experts, so we’re not going to make any broad sweeping statements about it. But the importance of “social” is pretty obvious.

Just login to your Google Analytics account and you’ll see a whole range of “social” metrics that they’re tracking.

From our perspective having a Google+ page and assigning the authorship for all our contributors for both Google+ and Twitter just makes sense. It doesn’t cost anything, beyond a few minutes of our time and hopefully it will help.

The web is constantly changing.

Keeping up with all the changes that can impact your site’s success is a full-time job, but investing a bit of time and effort doesn’t have to be.

We’re sharing *some* of our content from here with our Google+ community – either manually or using Hootsuite, which is one of the few tools that integrates with Google+ at the moment.

So what kind of impact can “social” have?

Are you seeing any benefits?

Do you see any downsides?

Why not let us know in the comments.

Related articles

• Authorship: What and How and Why is it so Important to Google? (stateofsearch.com)
• How to Prepare for AuthorRank and Get the Jump on Google (seomoz.org)
• Short URLs Coming To Google+ Profiles (technology.ie)