If you’re an author and decided to take the markup steps that Google+ announced a while back, your Google+ follower numbers are showing up next to your profile in Google search results.
In June, Google explained the new markup language this way:
We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.
A source confirmed that the next step of that feature, actually showing the number of Circles you’re in on Google+ in Google search results has been turned on.
The results look something like this, so if you’re searching for people or content on Google, you may spot this in the wild:
If you’d like to add this information to your site or blog to have the number of Circles you’re in to show up in results too, Google has set up a help center area to give you a hand.
While this is great for authors, we think that most Google+ users would want to turn this on for themselves, so hopefully Google makes that a feature for all soon, without having to do any coding on a website.
Would you even want this information to appear in Google search results or would it creep you out? Let us know in the comments.
Bingo! - "What worries me about a circle count is that it might lead to bad behavior on the part of people who might attempt to manipulate those counts, creating fake profiles so that they can add selected people to circles." ..... You know this will happen and in time someone will find a way to get users to unknowing add them in their circle.
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LikeInteresting. Overall all I am ok with it showing because it is public information on my profile; I would assume if I don't show the count on my profile it would not show for my author markup in the search results.
Although, like Bill Slawski I think it could be abused because now it becomes a popularity contest in the search results. Also, for a user searching it becomes a metric that does not particularly give any insight into the article. More followers doesn't necessarily equal a better article or author.
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LikeRight! 3000 circles all hating you or listing you as an expert on cars, doesn't give weight to your first article on global warming.
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LikeHi Drew,
Thanks for using my image in your post. It's great to hear that you received confirmation that this was a next step from Google. I hate to say this, but I haven't seen any of the circle counts in search results for approximately the last hour or so. I don't know if I want to see them return.
I'm not sure that a pure popularity based metric like a circle count is the ideal approach for Google to take. In a few presentations and papers, Google has discussed a user rank metric like the one that they use in Google Confucius in roughly 68 countries outside of the United States, which could potentially be used to help rank Google Plus content in search results.
That user rank metric can vary based upon the topic of the content, and it might combine both a contribution score, and a "meaningful" interaction score based upon your interactions with others. The problem is though, that it just isn't as easy or as intuitive to understand as a count of the number of circles someone is in.
What worries me about a circle count is that it might lead to bad behavior on the part of people who might attempt to manipulate those counts, creating fake profiles so that they can add selected people to circles. The user rank approach involves considerably more work, to the point where it's possibly more work to create fake profiles than it is to use real ones.
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