Wails of anguish, even from Cersys, are greeting last week’s Google search changes.

The social world has shrunk. Google is cheating their Google+ results higher in ranking than everything else, and dropping twitter results entirely. Or so I hear. I was hoping to weather the storm, but this is business.

This directly affects the Cersys brand – how many hits prospective customers will get when googling for our consultants and services.  Our Twitter and blog are active and successful in their tiny way, but we haven’t put any effort into plus.  As a small business starting out its social media brand, it’s time-consuming and expensive for us to promote through all the channels.  So Google wasn’t on our list, until now.

If nothing changes, the only way to combat this is to establish a mirrored G+ presence of useful content, so that members of the Google hive hit our results there too. Such coercion is blatantly manipulative of their powerful position: it must violate several anti-trust guidelines.

Bring on the trust-busters! #SEC, make this problem go away!

announced last week – Google has adjusted its algorithms to favour Google Plus posts – and if they are promoted, than others necessarily fall behind. This is more than just a poke in the eye for Facebook, Twitter and their users. By elevating your existing connections over the rest, this change narrows your world view. It may well encourage businesses to interact more with their existing clients and users but it does nothing to encourage either open-ness of thought or new connections. An article With Google+ favouritism, Google has decided to sell its soul – and it may pay http://bit.ly/wWNRvB summarises the issues here. It includes a video, Hitler hears about Google Search plus Your World. I want to see Katy Perry’s Facebook and tweets, says Adolf, not her empty Google Plus page. You can work out for yourself how this deliberately trivial example translates into real-world business marketing.

As you can see if you are reading this, I had already started creating Google Plus content, though I have not yet properly begun interactions to capitalise on that. Initial tests suggest that Google Plus posts get into Google’s own indexes reasonably quickly – but my WordPress blog is still beating it hands down. Interestingly, this was true when I first set up the blog in 2007, when I compared the “findability” of WordPress posts versus Google’s own blogger, opting for WordPress as a result. Google seems to have lost its grip on the basic mechanics of search in its enthusiasm to do down its rivals.

I am certain that having a lot of good Google Plus content will broaden my audience and, indeed, is doing so already. That is my objective, and it is open to any other business to increase its exposure and influence in the same way. My objection is to do with Google’s apparent abuse of its dominant position by its deliberate decision to omit the content of its rivals, and the concomitant loss in value of the search mechanisms which made Google’s fortune and changed the way we find and use information.

via eDisclosure Information Project – Google+.