Google+ Mobile Recommendations

Published on 23 Aug 2013 at 11:47 am.
Filed under Google,Informative,Mobile,Search Engine Optimization,Social Media.

Google+ mobile recommendations is a way to keep users engaged with content on your mobile website. Engaged users can help improve your SEO.

What do Google+ Mobile Recommendations Look Like?

Google+ mobile recommendations are a bar that appears at the bottom of your website. It will display a bar with the name of a Google+ user that has engaged with your content. These engagements are primarily +1 and shares.

When you click on the bar it will expand to show you more recommendations. It will primarily pull information from your Google+ circles. It will fallback to information shared by other users on Google+. It picks topics based on Google Authorship and activity on Google+. This level of engagement shows another reason you must market your brand on Google+.

How do I get Google+ Mobile Recommendations?

The first step to getting mobile recommendations is to link your website to your Google+ page. From there you will browse to your Google+ Dashboard and select the page to manage. On this page there is a tab titled For Your Site. On this tab you will see a section titled One time setup or Get Setup Code. The former will display the first time you’ve accessed this section, while the latter is for returning users.

The documentation then says that there is a link tag and a script block that you must add to your page. The link tag is something that should already be on your site during the verification process. It does not even appear in the setup code on our site. Regardless, the script block is the most important part that must appear on your site. Please be aware that a similar script block may already appear on your site if you are using a Google+ button, badge, or sharing widget. If you do then all you need to do is append “?publisherid={{PAGE_ID}}” to the URL for the script. You’ll need to replace “{{PAGE_ID}}” with the page id in the script. You must click the Done or Save button at the end for changes to go live. Don’t simply copy the code. The code is not active until you click these buttons.

The Google+ Mobile Recommendations code widget gives you some flexibility. You can specify URLs that you do not want the widget to ever show. You can also prevent it from showing recommendations on certain pages. Additionally you can configure the widget to display when the user scrolls up, or when they scroll passed certain elements on a page. The default is to display the widget when a user scrolls up. New visitors see configuration changes. Users currently browsing the site need up to a half hour to see the change. A user manually clearing the cache can see the changes immediately.

Why do all of your Google+ Mobile Recommendations say Website Design?

Good question! I think I’ve discovered a bug in Google’s rich snippets parser. The rich snippets parser scans a page for microdata and microformats. I am a strong believer in using microdata to improve SEO. We primarily use the BlogPosting (BP) and SiteNavigationElement (SNE) schemas on this site. We use the SNE schema on every link in our navigation. We use the BP schema in the body of blog posts. To be clear, the BP begins after the last SNE ends.

The SNE schema defines url and name fields. The BP schema can define headline and name fields. One would think that these are the same. We, like most blogs, only used the headline. With this omission I believe Google decided to scan the page for the first occurrence of a name field. For us this is the Website Design link. I have updated our blog template to reference both a headline and a name for the post. It will take some time for Google to re-crawl the site and update their index. Let this be a warning to all web developers and SEO experts out there.

EDIT: I have since learned that Google+ pulls the first name property found on the page. This means that the developers have a flawed understanding of the correct way to use SNE. I have updated our template to remove the reference to the name property.

EDIT #2: Since publishing this post it appears that Google has brought these recommendations to the desktop when you mouse over the +1 button.

This post was originally published as Google+ Mobile Recommendations for Brand Builder Websites.