NB: This is a guest article by Johann Thorsson, social media manager at travel search engine Dohop.
It was, unfortunately, bound to happen. PLUS ONE NO MORE. We removed the option to "+1" our front page today.
Why? Today we received yet another complaint from a user that said our page was loading really slowly for her. This is bad news, you only get so much time until a user gives up and goes elsewhere, so loading time for our front page is crucial.
After debugging her issue, we saw that it was the loading time for the Google+ button that was holding the rest of the site back.
This, a product from a company that says website loading speed is factoring more and more into their search algorithm, just wouldn’t do.
But that is not the only reason we are removing it.
When Google announced the +1 button, we were eager to install it as soon as we could, hoping it might give us a boost in the rankings, with only a handful of +1s versus more than a hundred tweets and five thousand Facebook "likes", it just wasn’t doing anything for us.
Even Google insiders admit this:
Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product.
Social media as a boost to SEO
A company of our size, with a very limited ad budget, has to rely on social media for help in getting the word out. Twitter has served us very well, as has our Facebook page, but we had not a single indication that Google plus was, or would, be of any use.
Even our employees, a bunch of nerds if there ever was one, were not using Google+, not seeing any point. And with no tangible clue as to when companies would be able to join the network the decision was easy.
When a social network is starting to hurt your business (via the slowing of our front page loading time), it is time to take it down.
We have been using SEOmoz to help us with SEO recently, and they suggested using social media to rank higher. The take away message is: get Facebook shares. We agree.
It is important to note that this is nothing to do with Google’s entrance into flight search.
As we wrote previously, there are numerous reasons we don’t really worry about Google flight search fumblings:
We know it is using ITA’s technology, and this relieves us greatly. Why? Because our technology is simply superior.
For example, Kayak (read ITA, its software supplier) just released something they call Hacker Fares. This means that Kayak now presents the user with the possibility of buying return tickets in two bookings. We have had this option for, oh, about six years.
Our decision to remove the +1 button is purely because of its complete lack of use. We might put it back up if Google really does manage to make the network to work, but until then, we will only give our users the option to tweet or share on Facebook.
In fact, why don’t you head over to our front page right now and flex your social muscle… give Google a little slap.
And for added irony, please +1 this post on Tnooz ;)
NB: This is a guest article by Johann Thorsson, social media manager at travel search engine Dohop.