How Can Google+ Benefit Our SEO Company?

It cannot. The network no longer exists. Google started deleting consumer profiles and pages on April 2, 2019. Communities went the same day. Nothing about it has come back since.

People still ask, though. Stale marketing checklists keep the idea alive. Guides written a decade ago still list a Google+ page as a recommended step. SEO Company To-The-TOP! has run search campaigns since 2007, four years before the network even launched. We watched it arrive. Then we watched it close.

So this post does two jobs. It explains what Google+ once did for search visibility. And it shows where each of those benefits lives in 2026.

Google+ Shut Down in 2019

2011 was the launch year. Facebook was the target. For a stretch, every product Google shipped had a Plus button bolted onto it. Traction never followed. Most users signed up once and never returned.

The end arrived in stages. An API bug exposed data from roughly 500,000 accounts. The wind-down announcement followed in October 2018. A second bug surfaced that December, worse than the first. Google then moved the closing date up to April 2, 2019. An enterprise version called Currents survived inside Google Workspace until 2023, then that closed too.

Any Google+ badge still sitting in a website footer now points at nothing. Worth removing during the next template update, if only for the dated look.

What Google+ Once Offered an SEO Company

Three features gave the network genuine weight in search marketing. None of them survived.

Authorship came first. Writers connected their articles to a Google+ profile through a rel=author tag. Their photo then appeared beside their content in search results. Click-through rates rose, sometimes sharply. We ran that markup on client blogs and watched it pull clicks. Google removed the photos in June 2014. The whole authorship program ended that August.

+1s were the second draw. The button worked like an upvote. Correlation studies from Moz and others showed pages with more +1s ranking higher. Google’s own engineers pushed back hard on that reading. Popular pages collected +1s because they already ranked well. The links had come first, in other words.

Personalized results came third. Search plus Your World launched in January 2012. Content shared by your Google+ circles moved up in your own results. Inside an active niche, that visibility was real. Outside one, most searchers never noticed a thing.

Why the Question Keeps Coming Up

Dead tactics circulate for years after they die. SEO checklists from 2013 still float around agency onboarding documents. Some audit templates never dropped the Google+ line item. A business owner reads one and sees the step. The question then lands in a discovery call. It has reached our inbox more than once.

Old advice also gets repackaged. Some providers still sell social profile setup bundles with the dead network quietly swapped for whatever is current. The pattern matters more than the platform. Tactics tied to a single product carry an expiry date nobody prints on the invoice.

Where Each Google+ Benefit Lives Now

Local visibility moved to Google Business Profile. The lineage is direct, since local listings actually lived inside the network for years as Google+ Local. Those listings survived the shutdown under the Google My Business name. Another rebrand in 2021 produced the current one. A complete, actively managed profile now does the local work the old network only promised. Reviews carry part of that weight. So do photos and accurate categories.

Author credibility moved into E-E-A-T. Google stopped needing a social network to identify who wrote what. Bylines carry that signal now. So do author pages and Person schema markup. The quality rater guidelines reward demonstrated expertise, with no photo perk attached this time.

Distribution scattered across every remaining channel. The +1 button died with the network, but the indirect path never changed. Shares put content in front of people who might link to it. Links move rankings. That chain is the entire SEO value of social media, then and now. Steady website promotion across channels a business actually controls beats any share button.

The Lesson a Dead Network Teaches

Platform-specific tricks age badly. Between 2011 and 2014, agencies sold authorship markup and circle-building as ranking work. Every hour of that effort produced nothing durable. Clients who spent those years improving their own sites came out ahead.

To-The-TOP! builds on the owned-asset side of that lesson. White hat work only, on properties the client controls. Content and site structure come first. Links earned from real publications follow. Each layer compounds for years instead of expiring with a product announcement. That approach has anchored our Calgary SEO work since 2007.

A proper website audit is where stale tactics surface, incidentally. Leftover rel=author markup still turns up on sites we review, twelve years after it stopped doing anything. Removing dead code is minor. Learning why it got there shapes better decisions.

Paid channels face the same test. Money going into Google Ads management stays there only while buyers keep searching. The moment a platform stops producing, the spend should move. No loyalty to any channel, only to results a monthly report can show.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Google+ coming back?

No sign of it. Google retired the consumer network in 2019 and the Currents follow-up in 2023. Anyone selling Google+ optimization today is selling work on a product that does not exist. Ask for a current deliverable list instead.

Do old Google+ links hurt a site now?

They sit there doing nothing. Links from the network died when its pages did, so no ranking harm flows from them today. A leftover badge in a footer only signals neglect to visitors. Clear it out during the next site update.

What replaced Google+ for local SEO?

Google Business Profile inherited the local role completely. Claim the listing and keep the hours current. Add photos and answer reviews. Check the categories once a season. That one free profile outweighs everything the old network ever contributed to local rankings.

Do social shares still help SEO?

Indirectly. Share counts are not a ranking factor. Google has said so for years. Exposure still earns the links and mentions that do move rankings, though. Treat social channels as distribution for content worth citing. The links then handle the ranking work.