Google+

What Was Google+?

Google+ (pronounced Google Plus) was Google’s most ambitious attempt to build a first-party social network and embed social identity directly into its search and product ecosystem. Launched in June 2011, Google+ was positioned not just as another social media platform, but as a social layer for the entire web, tightly integrated with Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Android, and Google identity itself.

Unlike short definitions typically found in glossaries, understanding Google+ properly requires looking at why Google built it, how it intersected with SEO, and why its failure still influences modern concepts like E-E-A-T, entity-based SEO, and creator trust signals.

Why Google Created Google+?

At the time of launch, Google faced a strategic problem:
Search was becoming increasingly social, personalized, and identity-driven, while Google itself lacked a strong, owned social graph.

Google+ was designed to solve multiple issues simultaneously:

• Create a verified identity layer tied to real users

• Improve personalized search results using social connections

• Power concepts like authorship, authority, and trust at scale

• Compete directly with platforms like Facebook and Twitter

This strategy aligned closely with Google’s long-term investment in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and its evolving Search Engine Algorithm, which was already shifting from keywords toward meaning, context, and entities.

Core Features That Defined Google+

Circles: Granular Social Graph Control

Circles allowed users to segment their social connections into contextual groups (friends, family, colleagues, etc.), a concept that mirrored real-world relationship boundaries more closely than flat friend lists.

From an SEO perspective, Circles supported early experiments with personalized search, where content visibility depended on social proximity—an early hint of what later evolved into Personalized Search and Search Intent Types.

Hangouts: Real-Time Interaction as Engagement Signal

Hangouts enabled live video conversations and group calls, later influencing Google’s broader communication stack. While not directly tied to rankings, Hangouts reinforced Google’s push toward user engagement, a concept now formalized through metrics like User Engagement and Engagement Rate.

Communities & Interest-Based Publishing

As mass adoption slowed, Google+ evolved into a network of topic-focused communities. These functioned similarly to modern content hubs and aligned conceptually with Topic Clusters / Content Hubs and Evergreen Content strategies used today.

The +1 Button: Endorsement, Not a Ranking Switch

The +1 button acted as a social endorsement mechanism. While often misunderstood as a direct ranking factor, +1s were better viewed as discovery and visibility accelerators, similar in effect to how Social Signals influence content amplification rather than algorithmic scoring.

Google+ and SEO: The Authorship & AuthorRank Era

Authorship Markup and rel=”author”

Google+ became the backbone of Google Authorship, where content creators could connect articles to verified profiles using markup. This experiment aimed to help Google evaluate content credibility, a precursor to modern Expertise-Authority-Trust (E-A-T) and today’s expanded E-E-A-T framework.

Although Google discontinued visible authorship snippets in 2014, the underlying concept never disappeared—it evolved into entity-level reputation assessment, now central to Entity-Based SEO.

Social Visibility vs. Ranking Influence

Content shared on Google+ often indexed quickly and surfaced in personalized results, reinforcing the role of distribution rather than manipulation. This mirrors how modern SEO treats platforms as traffic catalysts, similar to Referral Traffic rather than ranking levers.

Why Google+ Failed?

Google+ did not fail because it lacked innovation—it failed because innovation alone does not create habit.

Key reasons included:

• Unclear positioning: social network, identity system, or publishing platform?

• Forced integration across Google products, which confused users

• Network effects favoring incumbents like Facebook

• Low sustained engagement, with most sessions lasting only seconds

From a quality standpoint, Google’s own evaluation echoed concepts SEOs know well: thin engagement, weak User Experience, and limited User Intent alignment.

Shutdown and the Enterprise Afterlife

Google announced the consumer shutdown in October 2018, officially closing Google+ in April 2019. The decision was tied to:

• Low engagement metrics

• API exposure risk identified under Project Strobe

• Strategic refocus on core products

A business version survived as Google+ for G Suite, later Google Currents, before being sunset and merged into internal collaboration tools—illustrating how product pruning resembles Content Pruning at the platform level.

What Google+ Taught SEO (That Still Matters)?

These lessons directly influence how Google evaluates Content Quality, Brand Mentions, and Search Journey Mapping today.

Google+ in the Context of Modern Search

Google+ was an early experiment in blending social context with search results. While the platform itself failed, its DNA lives on in:

• Entity recognition and knowledge graphs

• Creator authority evaluation

• AI-driven context understanding

• Personalized and predictive search behavior

In many ways, Google+ was a premature solution to problems Google is solving now through AI Overviews, entity modeling, and holistic SEO thinking.

Final Thoughts on Google+

Google+ should not be remembered as “Google’s failed social network,” but as a transitional experiment that shaped how Google understands people, creators, and credibility on the web.

For SEOs, Google+ represents a critical inflection point—when optimization began shifting away from tactics and toward trust, identity, and semantic understanding, a shift that continues to define search today.