Google are testing a new feature called Google +1. the aim of this facility is to help enable you to vote for the sites that you like. The payoff for you is the sites that you like will be given a higher ranking in SERPs. The payoff for Google is that they get information on which are the best sites on the web.

You “+1ing” a site is your opportunity to say that this site is providing quality information and, as we all know, Google loves a site that provides quality information. I’m sure that Google will be using these votes in their algorithm. It makes sense to do this. What better way to help work out which are the best sites than by harnessing the wisdom of crowds? Google has a continual battle to prevent manipulation of it’s results pages. If people can tell them that a site is good then that is a more accurate measure than any number of inbound links that may or may not have been paid for. We will all be curators of the web, helping the finest sites rise to the top.

Of course if this experiment moves out of the experimental stage then it is perfectly possible that a new industry in “+1ing” sites to try to influence a sites ranking.

To take part you will need a Google account. Log in and then go to the experiments page and choose to enroll in the +1 experiment. You can only subscribe to one experiment at a time, so bear this in mind if it won’t let you join.

When you go back to google.com and search you will see a little +1 icon to the right of the page title. All you need to do is click on the icon to cast your vote for the page. You also need to be aware that the feature is only available at the moment via google.com, not local derivatives.

One immediate drawback is that you can currently only vote for a site within Google and, of course, to view a site you have to leave Google which means you have to return to Google in order to cast your vote. Google has said that they eventually intend that users will be able to cast their vote from within the destination site, rather similar to a Facebook Like Button.

One of the results of this project is the fact that SEO personnel will have two lots of results to check, those with and without Google +1 results included. Though I have no doubt that this will be fully integrated into Google Analytics.

My final point would be to simply point out that for a website to be successful the real key is quality of content and maybe Google +1 will help this be achieved.