The impact of Google Plus

While Matt Cutts from Google says that +1s Don't Improve Rankings it seems that sharing on Google+ has a huge impact.

After a little experiment Michael Q Todd showed How to rank 2nd + 3rd in a keyword (Wenyard) in 3 days with Google+ posts.

Of course he saw that result while he was logged in to Google, which means he was in his own bubble.

After seeing his post on Google+ about this I tried to search for the keyword wenyard and have not seen his share. Then I added Michael Q Todd to one of my circles and searched again. That time I already saw his share of wenyard on Google+.

Then, just to play a bit more, I removed him from my circle and after a few minutes searched again. The link disappeared from the results.
Adding him back to the circle and the link came back as the 3rd hit.

Conclusion

Google will rank Google+ shares of people in your circle very high.

This sounds logical. The assumption is that you will want to hear the opinion of people you are following.

TODO

If you'd like to promote a link, for example the Perl Tutorial hub, then share it on Google+ with the hash-tags #perl and #tutorial, and get people with lots of followers on Google+ to do the same.

This won't get more people to use Perl, but it will get more people who are already searching for perl tutorials to find ones that are recommended by the Perl community.

I just did that on the Google+ page of the Perl Weekly newsletter.

Same with any other topic.