Google Plus in Search Results is a Big Win for the White Hats

Of course you have heard the news -- Google is now including personalized search results from Google Plus in their search results by default.

While there have been a lot of negative comments about Google's move, I see this as a big win for those of us who play by the rules - those of us who create great content and have developed a large readership.

Until now, the only way for a website to rank highly in Google's search results was to have a lot of inbound links from other websites. That scheme created two major problems for those of us who focus on providing real content to real readers.

1. Real readers don't tend to be in the small club of website and blog owners, and therefore had no way of "voting" for the best websites. Those websites that won the search rankings were those that appealed to the owners of other blogs and websites. And worse yet...

2. The link counting scheme for choosing the "best" websites was too easy to "game" by the unscrupulous. In spite of Google's best efforts to police purchased links and other "black hat" manipulations, the bottom line was that the bad guys were winning.

Including Google Plus popularity changes all this -- for the better. Those of us who have real readers have access to having our readers "like" us using Google Plus, which - unlike blog and website ownership - is accessible to everybody.

Cheers for Google and for Google Plus! Facebook and Twitter won't like this. Spammers and affiliate marketers and Ponzi scheme website owners won't like this. But if you run a quality website that delivers quality content to real readers, you too should be cheering for Google Plus and its place of honor as a factor in Google search results.