Blog: SEO and its Effect

{glossarbot=disable}

Please participate in our experiment about Google's new '+1' button. As SEO enthusiasts we want to find out more on how the +1 button influences Google search results. So we devised a little experiment and we need your help to make it work. Follow these four steps to participate.

As a thank you, you'll get the white-paper with all the results and also 1 free SEO Effect credit (worth $9,-).

About the Google +1 button

As you may have heard already, Google launched the +1 experiment march 31. From the Google blog:

"Use +1 to give something your public stamp of approval, so friends, contacts, and others can find the best stuff when they search. Get recommendations for the things that interest you, right when you want them, in your search results."

For now its only possible to '+1' a website in a Google search result. In the near future it's also possible to add a kind of Facebook-like +1 button to your site. Learn more about +1 here.

As a valued SEO Effect visitor or user we ask you to help us figure out the effects of the +1 button. It is a little "social experiment" of the SEO Effect community about this new phenomenon.

Our Google +1 button experiment

We like to know how the +1 button will influence search results. Will a lot of +1 clicks improve traffic? How many people in your social circle that +1'd a URL will you see by name? Does this differ between new or older URLs? Domain names or deep urls?

To answer these and other questions we setup a Google +1 button experiment. We ask you to '+1' three urls:

• a homepage
• a older URL page
• a new URL page (this page)

How to participate in four steps

Follow these steps to participate in this SEO Effect +1 button experiment. The links in each step will lead you to the right page or search result.

1. Make sure you're signed into your Google Account (required)
2. Click 'Join this experiment' on Google
3. Mark three +1 Google buttons as follows:
   
   1. Click here to search for SEO Effect on Google.com (for our non US clients, make sure that Google is not redirecting you to your local Google like google.fr or google.nl. Tip: on the Google homepage, in the footer there is usually a link that takes you to google.com)
      1. Click the new +1 button near the first result for "www.seoeffect.com" (the first time you click the +1 button in a session you have to confirm it in a second screen)
   2. Do this again for the search ‘SEO Effect Participate in the Google +1 button experiment' and click on the first URL.
   3. Do this again for the search ‘SEO effect keyword research tool for search engine promotion' and click on the first result URL.
4. Retweet this post using the tweet button below, to let us know you participated. We will review your public Google profile to check if you correctly +1'd the 3 URLs. We'll also use your Twitter account to contact you about the free credit. So please follow SEO Effect on twitter. It will allow us to send a direct message.
   Please note: Only when we reach at least 50 participants the free credits will be awarded. And of course we 'd like more data: the maximum number of reward-credits is set at 150. There is no limit to getting the white paper. So alert others if you think this is also useful to them.
   We will review your public Google profile if you correctly +1'd the 3 URLs.

Join our experiment today

We keep you posted in the comments of this post about the SERP results and of course if we get to the threshold of 50 contributers. Thank you for contributing!

1) Why the SEO Effect site?

Though we thought it might seem a little self serving to let you '+1' our own site, it is still our best option. We wanted a site of medium strength, with international search results and a site that we could experiment with (so not one of our customers' sites ...). So that made the SEO Effect site our best option.