Google Profiles – People Search Improvement or Social Media Supremacy?

Google announced earlier that by enhancing Google Profiles they give people a greater control over their online profiles when somebody searches for their names on search engines. Google has already started showing Google profile results at the bottom of US search queries for people names.

Currently only 4 profiles are shown for name-query searches. These results provide snippets from user-generated Google profiles and link to the profile pages. From your Google profile you can link to your blog, LinkedIn profile, or Twitter account. Currently the links are not using nofollow. However, that might change as spammers might start building bogus accounts just for the sake of link building.

By providing links to your other sites from your Google Profile, you can help Google better build a Social Graph of you on the Internet. Google can potentially use this data to better understand the relationship between sites, decide how to flow PageRank, and further personalize search results.

As Google Profiles evolves, Google will add more functionality to the product which will provide Google with more insight into people`s social connections.

Even the Google Profiles are currently shown at the bottom of the SERPs, they could potentially rank on top of the search engine results pages which could potentially divert the traffic from major social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter providing Google with more real estate/platform for socio-demographic advertising.

Nima Asrar Haghighi, SMO Expert