Google Plus WordPress Theme

Introducing the Google Plus WordPress theme called Reflex Plus developed via me (Naeem Noor). The topic is of course motivated via the fresh Social Media Site Google+. Reflex Plus is my first ever publicly discharged WordPress topic ever. It’s a plain minimalist three columns plan, remarkably quick and jQuery Powered read more pagination.

Theme Features

3 Columns Minimal Design
Google+ Inspired
Valid Xhtml & CSS3
Custom Menus compatible
Post thumbnails support
jQuery Powered read more pagination
Fixed width
GPL Licensed

How to Install

In command to exert this WordPress topic all you have to do is, upload the Reflex Plus Theme package through (WordPress Dashboard -> Appearance -> Themes -> Upload) and Activate it like you do for any other WordPress theme.

Demo & Download

Demo | Download

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How Will Google Plus Affect SEO?

Google Plus has been survive for scarcely couple weeks, but unavoidably, online marketers and track down drive optimization gurus are curious come seal how the novel social goods might consequence organic track down gradings in the future.

Officially, there's no official indication of how Plus will affect SEO, but wealth of speculation and numerous noticeable hints come seal where item may be headed.


Signs Point to Social Factors Influencing Search Rankings

Even in the past Google rolled out the +1 button (a precursor to Google Plus itself), social factors from sites like Twitter and Facebook were already being cooked into track down drive issue pages (SERPs), even if the distance of their current consequence on Page Rank wasn't without hold back obvious.

For case, research has gestured that the diagram of retweets a link receives on Twitter has an appearance on how it's indexed on Google, or at least that was the covering in the past Google quietly disturb the Twitter firehose from their track down results and folded its real-time track down attribute quicker this month.

With Google Plus and the +1 button, the social achievements are taking location on Google itself, so it's hard to feign item like the diagram of +1 button clicks a given page receives wouldn't have an appearance on that page's organic rankings.

Twitter Remains Relevant, But Google Plus's Impact is Less Clear

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEO software seller SEOMoz recently undertook numerous experiments on Twitter and Google Plus to suppose how these social media sites modification track down gradings, particularly in candle of recent modifications to Google's real-time track down feature.

Fishkin written a series of unique, unindexed URL's and shared them solely on Twitter in the past and later the Google firehose shutoff. He afterward shared another URL solely by engaging Google Plus. In each covering, he petitioned buff to retweet or reshare the post, but not to do so into the open of the deriving from social site.

The results demonstrated that even though the Twitter firehose was no longer flowing straight away Google's way, tweets and retweets immobile give supplement in page indexation. One possible factor here is the many tweet-scraping sites that without thinking republish tweets into the open of Twitter.com.

In the Google Plus sharing test, the tryout page was organised #1 on Google within 2 hours, demonstrating that Google's novel social goods can assist pages receive indexed, even so not fairly as speedily as Twitter adapted to. In terms of actual gradings, the SEOMoz team wasn't able to pinpoint a correlation there.

Too Early in the Game to Tell

It's hard to feign that Google Plus and the +1 won't have a ample impact on both indexation and position of URL's in track down results. Not simply is the +1 button included on every post withing Google Plus and on content publishers' Websites, but it's literally sitting subsequent to every single track down issue that Google returns. Whatever the algorithmic appearance this may have in the future, right now it's perhaps too early to exactly predict.

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Google+ About To Hit 10 Million Users [REPORT]

Google’s social network, Google+, might be one of the fastest-growing networks ever, having already reached 10 million users according to one estimate.

Paul Allen, of Ancestry.com — not to be confused with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — has developed an interesting methodology to calculate the number of Google+ members.

He sampled a number of surnames from the U.S. Census Bureau data and compared it to surnames of Google+ users. By comparing surname popularity in the U.S. with the number of users on Google+ with each surname, he can guesstimate the percentage of the U.S. population that signed up for Google+. Finally, he calculated a ratio of U.S. to non-U.S. users to generate an estimate for the number of Google+ users worldwide.

The result? Google+ has approximately 9.5 million users worldwide, with 2.2 million joining in the past 32 to 34 hours, according to Allen’s estimates.

This is amazing growth even for a giant such as Google: We cannot remember any social network reaching so many members so quickly after its release.

Coming from a third party, the data is obviously unofficial (we asked Google for comment on these numbers, but haven’t heard from them) and should be taken with a grain of salt. If they’re true, though, they indicate that — after so many stumbles — Google might finally be conquering the social networking arena.

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Google+ Cheat Sheet

Get some cool Cheat Codes, and handle your account with keyboard by using these Google plus code now it is so much easy, and useful. Have a look,

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The Google+ project: Explore Settings

Learn how you can use settings in Google+ to manage who you share with and what you share.

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The Google+ project: Explore Sparks

Learn how Sparks can help you strike up a conversation by showing you articles, blog posts and videos about the stuff you're interested in. Find out more at plus.google.com.

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The Google+ project: Explore Hangouts

Hang out with up to ten friends, in real-time video, from anywhere. Pop in and out as you want. Find out more at plus.google.com

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The Google+ project: Explore Circles

Learn how Circles in Google+ can make sharing on the web a little more like sharing in real life. Find out more at plus.google.com.

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7 Google Plus Data Points That Could Change SEO

Google, as a company, is one of the most powerful PR machines in the world. In recent times Google has started discussing openly the lack of importance of Pagerank, which has been the main driving factor behind ranking in Google since its inception around 2001.

They are also openly talking about the diminishing role links are playing in the algorithm. Granted, I am not sure that is entirely the case (partially true?), but there is something in there between the lines that is worth diving into. A lot of times you can read between the lines with what Google announces to the general public and figure out what they might actually act on.

One thing is certain, social data and interactions are worth their weight in gold and could help offset this idea of Pagerank

As most folks already know Google launched its own social network recently called Google Plus (Google+) Probably a smart move for Google. Why, you might ask, outside of the obvious assertion that people will be spending more time on Google properties vs. Facebook and Twitter?

Well, Google+ is going to be a treasure trove of data for Google and its advertisers. The data that they will be exposed to will certainly be game changing from an SEO standpoint.

Google recently filed a patent that shows how some of the new modifications to the SERP (search engine results page) might look with the addition of new data sets. It doesn't take much creative thought to see how Google might utilize status updates that are heavily +1ed, commented on or shared.

Google has proven recently that altering its SERPs is not something they are afraid to do.

Lets take a look at the different aspects of Google+ that could easily turn into valuable algorithmic data.

Google + Circles

Basically Circles can be seen as a vote for people, like links are a vote for websites. This will allow Google to better understand the influencers within its network.

Google +1 Button

The more obvious metric, this can be used to glean insights on authoritative status updates, images, webpages, etc. Although, personally, I think its a noisy variable that could easily be manipulated and has many user experience (UX) discrepancies.

Google + Sparks

If there is anything Google wants you to do, it wants you to build out Sparks on your profile. Sparks are simply a creative name for your Interests. This will give Google another layer of targeting. If Google can understand your interests then they can interpret the weight of your voting abilities on given subject matters.

Google + Profile Data

The profile page consists of many opportunities for Google to better understand you. Individuals have the opportunity to unveil their occupation, employment history, education, places lived, birthday and gender. You can even add links you're associated with. This better ties down your associations that can be interpreted by an equation.

Google + Hangouts

Hangouts are simply group voice chats. There are other companies in the group video industry, and some of them even transcribe the conversations. I have not looked into it fully but Google could possibly "listen in" and interpret your video chats and derive data based off of those conversations.

Localization Data

Google+ has heavy integration straight out of the box with Mobile. On top of that, the GPS location setting is prominent and is a key focus. That sort of data allows them to better target users based on their geographic location. Advertisers will certainly like that option.

Localization data also helps determine relevance, on a user level and on a per status update level, for geographic queries. Photos

Want to create a real life bond in a social network according to a robot crawling through data? Stand next to another Google+ user in a photo that is automatically associated with facial recognition. This is a very easy way for Google to better understand who your real life connections are.

Other Social Networks Google is Looking To Associate With Your Account

• Quora


• Facebook


• Yahoo (accesses your contact list)


• Flickr


• LinkedIn


• Twitter


• Yelp


• Hotmail (accesses your contact list)


• Plaxo

Google + is Anti-Spam

One form of spam that can really poison a dataset typically comes from folks who create thousands of social network accounts and rotate votes around. With the advent of Google+ its possible to track things that will be difficult to game, namely because of time it would take to look 'natural.' Your comment history, sharing activity, and other network interactions adds a huge layer of anti-spam mechanisms to weed out and devalue social accounts with.

So how do all these factors play together?

Granted, no one really knows, but one can infer that with more data on you,the Author, Google can better tweak their algorithm to a point of supreme relevancy.

Google hasn't had a true relevancy breakthrough for a long time now. This could be their big ticket they have been looking for since Facebook applied the pressure several years ago. Even at best if 5% of the United States population uses Google+ then it is a win for them, in my opinion.

Here is one possible scenario post Google+ adoption: A user (we will call him "Sam") is doing research and has a Google+ account. While Sams doing his research, his activity inside of Google+ helps the algorithms understand that he has affinities towards the outdoors, snorkeling, organic food, green energy and gardening.

When Sam searches for How to Garden, he will be served with results that are skewed with articles that discuss organic gardening and gardening with a low impact on the earth. Google is able to deliver this result based off of the data it has on him and other users. Sites that might have never ranked before in the top 10, now are ranking because they have data that Google+ interpreted as the most relevant 'Top 10 result. A small DIY gardening site that wasn't heavily linked to, but has a solid fan base on various social networks, can launch and engage in heavily discussed and shared status updates, stand a great chance to see increases in potential, qualified traffic with this sort of situation. Social and SEO are now full circle. If you haven't taken it seriously in the past, now is the time to.

"As compared to a traditional web search engine, where the challenge lies in finding the right document to satisfy a user's information need, the challenge in a social search engine is to find the right person to satisfy a user's information need." -Src.

If you are on Google Plus already feel free to give me a follow.

Comments

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Google+ Launched: Social network with Circles, Hangouts & Sparks

Google today Unvieled biggest step in Social networking space by launching a competitor to Facebook. Company introduced Google+ project (don’t mistake it with Google +1).
One major difference between Google+ (Google plus) is that you can communicate to your friends in selected groups. In an Official Statement Bradley Horowitz, a vice president of product management at Google said “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world”.

Google+ project primarily consists of four main elements including

Google Circle:

This new service looks to be revolving around a toolbar and new ‘Google Circles’ where user can share share different things with different people. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from one birthday party in one circle, your office contacts in another, and a different circle for your family.

Google Hangouts:

Video chat has always been an attraction for friends and family to share and hence the approach taken by Google here makes lot of sense. Hangout lets friends notify each other that they’re willing to chat from anywhere, It will also notify other members of the circle incase a chat starts in a circle.

Sparks:

Similar to you sharing stories on facebook, Google has planned for sparks where you can intiate a spark by starting a thread of interest in a circle.

Mobile:

This is only to available to Android users as of now, Using this application users can tag posts to the Google+ page with your geo-location, Once you have added the picture to your Google+ page you can share it with your circles in realtime.

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Google Hangouts: Thoughts on Concept vs. Functionality

Today’s discussion topic was sparked by the launch of the new Google+ experiment, specifically Google Hangouts, which represent a new twist on video conferencing.

There’s an important lesson here about how you can take a product with not-so-revolutionary functionality and present it in such a way that it is instantly more useful to potential users.


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The Launch of Google+

Having apparently learned from their past mistakes regarding making a big deal out of product releases, Google decided to roll out Google+ this week in a fairly quiet fashion. Of course, all of us web-addicts instantly flocked over anyway to see what’s happening.

If you don’t have an invite yet, Google+ is not one but a group of integrated products: Circles, Hangouts, Instant Upload, Sparks and Huddle for now with more to come later.

The basic hub has an undeniably Facebook-like stream showing you various activities from your Circles, which are distinct groups that you create for certain people: friends, family, coworkers, classmates, etc. Circles make it easy to share certain things with certain people rather than pushing out every update to everyone on your friends list.

Instant upload is a new way to quickly get photos from your phone to the web, Sparks is a sort of personalized news aggregator and huddle is a group messaging system.

Whether or not Google+ as a whole is a great idea or doomed for failure is a topic for another day and likely another blog. Today I want to focus on the product that I haven’t explained yet: Hangouts.

What Are Hangouts?

Google is spinning Hangouts as a way to organically meet up online. The basic idea is that hanging out with people used to be a lot simpler, and can be that way again.

For instance, in my fairly small home town there was a public basketball court a couple of blocks from my house. When I was growing up I would frequently walk to the basketball court to hang out with some friends. I didn’t need to call anyone and have them meet me, just being there pretty much guaranteed that someone I knew would walk by and stop to shoot hoops for a while.

Google Hangouts seek to accomplish the same thing via video chat. The basic idea is that you start a new “Hangout,” which essentially tells your friends that you’re on your computer and willing to chat with anyone that shows up. If three of your buddies happen to be on as well, you can all meet up and, for lack of a better term, hang out.

Same Old Functionality

The way Google explains this feature and shows it off in videos is really great. It makes you nostalgic for simpler times and eager to start your own Hangout to meet up with old friends, drink Coke from a glass bottle and shoot the breeze.

As I watched the video I couldn’t help but think of what a great idea this was. However, the more I thought about it the more I realized that there’s really not much to it that we don’t already have.

What Google has set up with Hangouts is a fairly straightforward video conferencing system just like we have everywhere else. If I’m on Skype, iChat or FaceTime, I can easily see which of my friends are on and launch a group chat so that we can all “hang out.”

Sure, there are some quirks and features that make each competing system its own (Hangouts has a cool center stage feature based on who is talking), but the core functionality of these video conferencing systems is nearly identical. We’ve had the resources to create digital hangouts for years, and yet this still feels new. Why?

New Concept

There’s an interesting mental barrier with the older systems (Skype, iChat, FaceTime, etc.) that we’ve had for years. The relative newness and awkwardness of video chats for us all makes it difficult to know when it is and isn’t appropriate to invite someone to talk face to face. Just because my pal David is signed onto Skype doesn’t mean that he wants to have a video chat.

This is one of the main hurdles that I wrote about when Apple first launched FaceTime for iOS devices. Face-to-face conversations on a mobile device are incredible, but who is really going to take that leap and start making video calls to their friends? When is a video call not appropriate? None of us know the etiquette yet.

Google has solved this problem with Hangouts in an extremely simple way. If you’re on “Hangouts” it means that you’re willing to start a video chat with anyone and everyone who is also on (given the Circles that you have selected). There’s no awkward protocol here, the concept of the system is structured so that you’re supposed to launch video chats with people.

Concepts vs. Functionality

Analyzing Google Hangouts really got me thinking about the idea of the concept of a service vs. its functionality. As designers, developers and entrepreneurs, we are forced to make countless decisions on this front whether we even realize it or not.


From our technical vantage point, the biggest mistake we are likely prone to make is by focusing on functionality at the neglect of a solid concept. Sometimes we get a basic idea in our heads and work like crazy to make sure it has all the best bells and whistles that it possibly can, and yet, no one really finds the need to use it. We have a solid product, and when it doesn’t work, it’s back to the drawing board to rethink the features. However, the problem is likely that we haven’t really thought of a great way to sell it to potential users.

Non-web-developer entrepreneurs can often be guilty of making the opposite mistake: focusing on a concept at the neglect of solid, stable and user-friendly functionality. Both of these pieces of the puzzle are necessities in a well-design and well-planned product.


Conclusion: So What?

The goal of this discussion is to get you to think differently about problem-solving. Instead of always updating the design or functionality of your site in an attempt to reel in more users, why not give some thought to your core concept?

How is your product similar to others in its category? How is it different? Most importantly, what are the general conceptual barriers that users face when interacting with products in this category and how can you position your product in such a way that those mental barriers are reduced or eliminated?

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Google Circles: The Dumbest Thing About Google+

Google surprised the world yesterday when it unveiled Google+, ostensibly the search giant's answer to Facebook. It's huge, it's social, and it's totally in your face, if the new Google home page is any indication. Google is clearly betting big on its latest foray into social networking, and it's making a point of highlighting many of the differences—and potential advantages—over its blue-and-white competitor.

Some of Google+'s features appear useful—for example, the Skype-like video chats (painfully called "hanging out") or the easy integration with Android devices. Others are impressive—the ability to upload reams of 1080p video rocks, and it's something that only a massively scalable company like Google could do. And then there's the perplexing stuff—the ability to integrate a YouTube video in a "hangout" is appreciated, but I don't know why I'd ever want to do that. (For a full run-down on Google+, check out PCMag's hands on.)

Among all the interesting features of Google+, one of the most heavily touted is Google Circles. Circles are what Google calls the various groups that you can organize your friends into. Once you've got them set up and populated, you then can pick which circles get to see the stuff you share. Your thumbs-down review of the latest episode of Glee? Probably just your friends. A chat about the company picnic? Work colleagues only for that one. Pics of your three-year-old niece? Strictly family. You get the idea. This YouTube video explains further:

Although Google holds it up as a differentiator, Facebook actually has a similar feature that lets you pile friends together in specific buckets—although, importantly, the "share only with these guys" isn't nearly as convenient. Google+, however, puts Circles front and center, playing up the premise that you don't want to share everything with everyone. And that idea is certainly true, but Google Circles is still the most misguided feature of the new social network.

The main problem with Google Circles is that it's tedious. While I agree that most people separate their contacts into various groups in real life, doing so in a social network is a chore. It's one of the reasons we have different social networks (LinkedIn for work, Facebook for friends, etc.). Asking people to do this kind of organizing proactively, on a single network, vastly overestimates the patience of Web users. Sure, some people are very organized and left-brained (like the engineers who created Google+), with spotless inboxes and well-maintained lists of contacts, but my feeling is that the vast majority aren't. And of all the things that have turned people off of Facebook over the years, the lack of focus on friend-organizing tools isn't one of them.

Ultimately, Google Circles misses one of the main points toward Web 2.0 theory, and of Google itself. Before Google, Yahoo was the dominant player in search, offering up the Web in organized hierarchies with its Directory. The idea was that people didn't search for stuff as much as look through listings in categories like a telephone book. Getting listed in the Yahoo Directory was a big deal back in the day.

Google changed all that. By creating a way to search for the specific things you wanted and get good, reliable results… well, it's the basis of Google's business model. And it was vastly successful. Soon, the whole idea of organizing things into authoritative hierarchies fell out of favor. Services like Delicious—which puts all your Web bookmarks into an easily searchable pile—are based on that idea (Delicious has had its problems, but they're not related to the basic validity of the idea). Web browsers now have this kind of functionality built in; ask yourself, do you rely more on bookmarking, or simply your browser's ability to remember which sites you've visited and predict where you want to go just by typing?

People want things easy, and Google Circles isn't easy. It puts the burden on users to take the time to think about each and every contact and put them in a specific bucket. To use the feature effectively, users will certainly have to create new circles, and that requires even more thought. After using Google+ for a few minutes last night, I was often unsure which Circles to put certain people in and, more to the point, which to leave them out of. And what if you create a new Circle that should include some of the people in other Circles you already have? You have to go back over all your contacts and reorganize. Ugh.
The answer to all this tedium, of course, is Facebook's approach. Just say, "Screw it—everybody in one pile." Then you only share on the network what you'd share with everyone online. The downside with this approach is that it foments the twin dangers of oversharing—putting things out there that aren't appropriate for your entire audience—or undersharing, where you self-neuter your presence on the network to trite, meaningless updates. Despite those concerns, Facebook hasn't been anything less than a vibrant, growing network, even if it often creates controversy.

I'd also argue that Facebook's approach is actually safer than Google's. As Anthony Weiner and many others before him have discovered, any walls we put up around our digital information are largely illusory. If Google Circles starts making people more comfortable with sharing intimate things behind these thin barriers… well, Weinergate could become the first of many social scandals, if Google+ gets traction.

Since Google+ doesn't rely solely on Circles, there's every chance it could become extremely popular in spite of them. But I suspect those friend buckets soon go the way of Google Wave, the company's other misguided read on how people behave online. Like Wave tried to be all online communcations (IM, chat, commenting, socializing) for all things, Google+'s Circles are really an attempt at being all social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer, Twitter) to all kinds of people. But in trying to do so, it's a tedious chore. The lesson for Google this time: Socializing online shouldn't feel like work.

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