One of the most interesting trends in the search industry right now is the integration of different social media “signals” into the results provided by Google and Microsoft Bing in response to search queries.
But there’s a difference between a search engine’s extra features and its raw algorithms for ranking web pages, and Google engineer Matt Cutts was careful to say that that the company isn’t giving undue weight to +1’s from Google Plus, its own social network, in its algorithmic results.
In other words, simply adding a bunch of Google +1 buttons to your site won’t necessarily boost your search ranking.
In a lively session with Danny Sullivan at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle yesterday evening, Cutts acknowledged Google Plus is still in its early days. He said the data coming from +1’s is “not the best quality signal yet.”
However, he said, in general he still sees a lot of promise in Google Plus as a social network.
See Search Engine Land’s live blog for more from the session.
We’ll have more from SMX Advanced later today.
