Google+ is shutting down. Here is how it will affect you personally, and potentially your website’s SEO.
In early October 2018, Google announced the shutdown of Google+ over the coming months.
Wait… You said what?
You read that right. Google is going to shut down its in-house consumer social network. The company announced that its decision to close the network was tied to two factors: low usage and a huge security problem.
Let’s start with the obvious: Google+ has been in decline for a number of years. The social network was launched with great fanfare in 2011, but quickly dropped in usage and engagement. Google itself said that 90% of Google+ user sessions lasted less than five seconds.
Ouch!!!
In addition, the network was never embraced by developers.
Although we have supported Google+ from the beginning, other social media management apps (and apps in general) never fully embraced the network.
About that “little” security flaw …
In October, Google published a blog post about an API bug endangering millions of users.
In short, the bug gave apps the ability to access data that users had marked as private. This included information such as names, email addresses, occupation, gender and age. Many of these fields were optional, so not all Google+ users were affected.
Oops!
Fortunately, Google said that messages and other important interactions had not been exposed.
Google said it discovered and fixed the bug in March 2018, which led us (and all other internet users) to wonder why they hadn’t told us sooner.
The search giant also said it only keeps API logs for two weeks, so it cannot tell us how many people were affected by the bug.
However, Google noted that up to 500,000 Google+ account profiles were potentially affected, based on a detailed analysis of user actions leading to the API bug.
To date, Google has noted that developers were not aware of the bug. The number of people actually affected is therefore probably minimal.
Here is how the shutdown will happen
Google+ will shut down over the next 10 months. The final closing date will be set for August 2019. We also hope to get more information about how the Google+ API will be shut down.
Over the coming months, and more precisely starting April 2, 2019, Google will provide consumers with instructions on downloading and migrating their data. That way, your photos and other uploaded content will be available for export at some point.
IMPORTANT NOTE : Google+ will not be shut down for business users. The network will continue to work as usual for now and after the August shutdown FOR BUSINESSES.
How will the shutdown affect you and your SEO?
This is where things get complicated: Google+ affects SEO on blogs and other web content.
Currently, there is the +1 count (Google’s version of an upvote). When you +1 a piece of content, the article will be reposted to your Google+ page, and a +1 counter will go up on your web page.
In addition, +1s personalize search based on your network. If enough people in your Google+ network +1 a post, the post will rank higher in your Google search results.
For now, Google has not yet explained how the shutdown of Google+ would affect SEO, but we will keep you posted as soon as we know more.
Conclusion
Many marketers have seen the end of Google+ coming for a long time. But it is unfortunate to see that such a widespread bug may have contributed to its death.
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