Google+ Now Gets A Full Banana – Canonical Support

Wednesday, 11 January 2012

Back in June when Google +1 was first introduced (the voting on links, not the full Google+ experience) I wrote about an issue I had with the new service.

Google +1 & The Problem With Canonicalization Of Votes

I’ve ripped the relevant section out of the original post so we can now look at the current state of play.

You will see that the value of both Google +1 buttons is now the same, as Google now treat them as the same page, even though one of them is a redirect.

This seems to work for lots of types of redirects, parameters for tracking etc, which is what made it important to support in the first place.
So now you have every reason to add specific tracking parameters to the URLs that get added to Google+ so that you can track the way they are shared and the traffic that generates.
You could even use a URL shortener like bit.ly to make your URL with parameters a little shorter.

What I haven’t yet tested are how subsequent redirects of the canonical page get handled, and what if any safeguards have been implemented to reduce abuse. I also haven’t tested how many redirects will be followed.

This was still an issue back at the beginning of Novemeber when I mentioned it on the G+ Developers group. No… I didn’t submit a bug ticket as suggested. I don’t consider myself enough of a dev to create a ticket with sufficient clarity on someone else’s product. I have to assume G+ product managers and evangelists monitor feedback for features to some extent.

This may have been announced as a fix sometime, but a search for Google+ canonicalization brings up such as messy SERP I gave up digging.

I would love to know who to talk to about geting uQast videos supported in Google products… everything currently strips out the iframes and I am assuming the logic is being shared between platforms (Google Reader, Google+, Google Currents etc.)

Google +1 Only Gets Half A Banana

As Google +1 has only just been launched, the uQast landing page hasn’t received 100s or 1000s of bookmarks but it is a good example of the current problem with Google’s implementation of the +1 button.

This is the same URL we were using in the above example, my uQast affiliate link, but it could be any tracking link, or just using Google Analytics tracking parameters.

http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312

This is how that button should be encoded
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312"></g:plusone>
With this result… I gave it a plus one to test this earlier as I am considering adding Google +1 to our landing pages, not just for our launch signup, but also throughout uQast and within our embeddable players.

If Google had implemented +1 correctly, then the count for a URL that points directly to the page would be the same.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/"></g:plusone>
At time of writing the affiliate link shows 1 and the “clean” link shows 0 – I am sure that will change over time