Will Google+ be gamed by SEO’s?

I’ve yet to see anyone get particularly excited about the launch of Google+ from an SEO perspective but believe me they will… I’ve been wondering if Google+ will feed into the organic search results and how that would work. Looking at some of the guidelines and help files shows that Google+ updates ‘may’ be fed into organic results and Google have put terms in their content policy to cover SEO’s trying to game this.

The Google+ User Content and Conduct Policy says the following:

8. Ranking Manipulation
Do not manipulate ranking or relevancy using techniques like repetitive or misleading keywords or metadata.

Meanwhile the Google+ support pages say:

When you share something publicly, it may appear in search results.

So, some updates from Google+ can be fed into the organic search results and Google are nervous about how this will be used by the less reputable SEO’s out there and expecting it to get gamed (at least to begin with). It’s likely there will be some level of gaming going on as people try to take advantage of another way to dominate the first page of organic results and while Google work out how best to deal with this new feed into search.

It will be interesting to see how they fit into search results, whether Google puts them with the Twitter or Realtime results, or whether they are properly integrated. Personally, I hope they keep them separated slightly, at least to start with, while they get to grips with the way people use Google+.