I did not notice this earlier, and I probably should have noticed sooner. But it seems like Google is doing a few things to try to boost its Google+ product. See this image here...
Immediately, you'll notice that my Google+ profile is ranked higher than my Twitter profile, despite the fact that I interact with Twitter {psst, follow @AndyHuang} a lot more than I do on Google+, and that I rarely post to Google+. Now, as an avid web person, we know that Google value in-bound links, so several educated guesses comes up:
- Does my Google+ profile have a lot more in-bound links than my Twitter profile? No, I don't think so.
- Does plus.google.com receive more in-bound links than Twitter? No: Google themselves proves it otherwise: 169,000,000 Google+ vs 3,150,000,000 Twitter
- What about page rank? plus.google.com is sitting at 8, and twitter.com is sitting at 9, according to PageRank Checker right now.
- Keyword density? No, @AndyHuang, and even AndyHuang is mentioned much more frequently, and even in <title> tag of Twitter profile
Furthermore, if you look carefully, you will notice something they've added a while back. Near the search result for my profile, you will notice a link that says "Block all twitter.com results". This is a feature added recently, which allows people who are logged in to block unwanted results. Now, granted that same thing can be done for Google Plus profile, but look, the profile magically wraps around at a much thinner width, burying the link in the middle of cluster of text.
Given how I love Google products -- absolutely love Google Apps for Domain Owners, and can't find my way from home to campus without Google Maps -- I must give them the benefit of the doubt; that they are not trying to block out Twitter in favor for Google Plus, and that these are just simple coincidences. But I really hope that they hear voice of little guys like me, and either correct this problem, or become more transparent as to why this is happening, so that Twitter aren't being down-played by the search results.
