Is Google + really being quietly shut down? What does this mean for SEO?

[rodelmo4]

I've recently seen & read more and more articles about Google +'s imminent shut down. How likely is that to happen and how will this affect Google Pages for Business, and overall SEO strategies? Like this article right here.

[Martin_S]

There seem to be other post floating around to the same effect.

I predicted its death a year or two ago. It's always been intrusive, hard to use, and just looks plain terrible.

[ClaytonJ]

Rocio

It has been talked about for a while. I am not sure google can entirely I assume a pivot seems more in order see attached article. Appears consistent with the one you linked through to.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/strategy/24146/are-the-curtains-closing-on-google

I like google+ because of it high impact on SEO for not much extra work, and many companies do not use it. A little trick disappearing.

[N1ghteyes]

A few more links about this, that i was able to dig out:

http://live.theverge.com/sundar-pichai-google-mwc-2015/

and the full thing:

http://www.mobileworldlive.com/mwl-extra-sundar-pichai-svp-of-products-at-google

[GoogleDowner]

Google created a monster when they moved Google Places to Google+ whatever-it's-called-today. It truly went from (not so) bad to worse. Besides the SEO trick that John Cross mentioned above, Google+ is a confusing mess. This is the first I heard about Google+ going the way of Internet Explorer, but if it's true, what are they replacing it with?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Rocio!

Good topic, and while nobody can provide a definitive answer to your question at this point (except maybe someone from Google!), my take on this is that Google could be:

1. Regretting that they tied Google+ to other products and is now untying it.

2. In the early stages of preparing for some kind of major change.

It could be both of these things or neither of them. I do not see Google's local product going away any time soon, and in fact, Google just announced that they want people logging into their Google My Business dashboard to signal to Google that their pages are still active ... so I believe the local portion of this is still a cornerstone of Google's big plan. But the social side ... it's having growing pains, I think. Not sure what's up, but it certainly is worthy of thought and discussion.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Here's a recent article on the subject: http://marketingland.com/googles-horowitz-no-google-plus-is-not-dead-130328

I think the whole 'authorship' and 'publisher' G+ features; linking real entities (people & organisations) to content, as a way of verifying & qualifying the content as being good quality & from a reputable source must be pretty helpful for Google so i would personally be surprised if they did away with those aspects of G+.

I know they have scaled back some aspects of 'authorship' such as removing the authors image in the SERPS but that could just be due to needing to reduce the 'computational budget/bandwidth' they allocate to it.