Back in April 2011 we featured the launch of Google’s +1 button, Google’s latest effort to make it’s SERPs more ‘social’, and now after many months of anticipation the +1 button has been rolled out globally.
The +1 button allows users to recommend ads and organic listings by clicking the button displayed next to it in the Google search results. Users will also be able to see sites that have been +1’d by their friends and other Internet users.
This alteration will happen automatically so you do not need to make any changes to your AdWords account in order to activate them. The landing page of your ads will also be legible to appear on the Google profile of any user who +1’s your ad.
Until this week the +1 button was only available on organic search results on google.com and English search ads, but now it will be visible on both paid search ads and organic search results globally.
Starting with the UK, Germany, Japan and France this new feature is due to expand to almost everywhere else shortly afterwards.
Google has already partnered with some of the big websites from across the globe that should soon start showing the +1 button on their web pages. Companies such as The Telegraph, The Independent, TechCrunch and NME are just a few of the big names that have partnered with Google.
Back in April, we pondered the effects this new feature would have on Google rankings and in its latest announcement Google tells us to “think of +1 buttons as an enhancement that can help already successful search campaigns perform even better”, which does imply that content that has been +1’d may well be favoured in Google’s rankings.
It will be interesting to see the affect this feature has now that more people will be able to use it, as it is rolled out worldwide. We’re also keen to see who uses both the annotation feature and whether users take advantage of being able to read people’s personal annotations when they choose to share them.
