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But the fascination with Google+ as a would-be Facebook killer obscures the larger story about what Google+ offers.

Google+ is really two things. One is a destination for connecting with friends and subjects that interest them. When the press writes about Google+, it's usually in this context. But Google+ plays a second role, as a product that improves other products. Google tends to talk about this in abstract terms -- it's "a social spine;" it's a "fabric;" it "weaves" Google products together. Let's try to be a little more concrete about what Google+ is doing besides giving people a Facebook alternative.

Google+ is a single sign-on system. Until the social network launched in June 2011, users of various Google services used different identities for each.

Having Google Authorship allows the original author to claim dibs on original content; however, according to Mark Traphagen the acclaimed Google+ guru (he really is), there is nothing in place with Google + right now that protects any writer from content scraping.

it doesn’t prevent someone from copying your content, just wouldn’t allow them to outrank you for it. I suspect we will have to wait for implementation of Author Rank for that to be fully in effect,” said Mark in a Google+ thread with Neal, Frank Strong, and me.

Neal said in a recent G+ thread, ” I still recommend every blogger to at least include one internal link in each of their blog posts so that if their content does get copied, and it’s often copied as part of blogs automatically importing content through RSS feed manipulation, that at least you get a back link.“

Google +1s are more highly correlated with search rankings than any other social factor, including Facebook likes/shares and Tweets.

“We have a lot of our clients whose titles are actually changing from SEO Manager to Content Strategist,” Dotterer said. “Search engine optimization sounds like you’re doing something to the engines themselves, but what you’re really doing is optimizing online content. You optimize it by changing the content you’ve already created to better fit the voice of the consumer. You also optimize by finding the gaps in the content so we can create more.”

The importance of content creation has encouraged more companies to get their SEO, social and creative teams more involved in content strategy,

eMarketer predicts the combined U.S. digital ad market share of Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL -0.23% Google and Facebook will fall for the first time this year, shrinking to 56.8% from 58.5% last year. At the same time, overall digital ad spending in the country is likely to grow nearly 19% to $107 billion in 2018.

That would give Google command of 37.2% of the market, down from 38.6%. Facebook’s market share will likely be 19.6%, down from 19.9%,

Advertisers’ relationships with Google and Facebook have grown tense in recent years amid controversies over ads appearing next to inappropriate content, measurement discrepancies, and questions over the tech companies’ roles in Russia’s efforts to spread misinformation to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

To help Google to pick the right date, site owners and publishers should: Show a clear date: Show a visible date prominently on the page. Use structured data: Use the datePublished and dateModified schema with the correct time zone designator for AMP or non-AMP pages. When using structured data, make sure to use the ISO 8601 format for dates.

Show when a page has been updated: If you update a page significantly, also update the visible date (and time, if you display that). If desired, you can show two dates: when a page was originally published and when it was updated. Just do so in a way that’s visually clear to your readers.

on’t use future dates or dates related to what a page is about: Always use a date for when a page itself was published or updated, not a date linked to something like an event that the page is writing about, especially for events or other subjects that happen in the future (you may use Event markup separately, if appropriate).

Not everyone has their Google Authorship set up yet so beat them to it now.  If you want to drive more traffic your way linking your blog to your Google+ account for Google Authorship will definitely do the trick.

Google is now showing tweets in a new and more graphical way on mobile devices, with desktop promised soon.

Tweets don’t always appear at the top of the page. Sometimes they might be elsewhere, such as the middle of the page

presumably, you’re more likely to see tweets in Google when a hashtag, topic, person or organization appears to be trending or is newsworthy.

hen you advertise with +Post, not only do you get an ad placed within the Google+ network; you get your social post placed – as an ad – throughout Google’s entire display network. That means access to ad space on over 2 million sites worldwide.

This lets brands think of the entire web as their social stream.” This is pretty powerful, and creates more of a two-way conversation than other networks have been able to do for advertisers. Now a social post – whether it’s a photo, video, or even a Google Hangout – can be used as a display ad, so not only can an advertiser drive clicks to their site, but drive engagement with an interested audience, no matter where that audience spends their time.

Google said it has redesigned its privacy and security dashboard "from the ground up" to better integrate it into other privacy controls and to make it more touchscreen-friendly.

More than 150 million people have used the My Activity feature to track down old links and videos, and "tens of millions" have used the Privacy Checkup tool to change their preferences. The "Takeout" feature lets your export your data out of Google, and has been used to export one exabyte of data since its creation in 2011. 

Google launched Universal Analytics Tuesday to help marketers sync and analyze data from across multiple marketing channels. The cross-channel tool aims to help marketers discover relationships among devices--desktop to tablets to phones to entertainment consoles--driving conversions.

Cross-channel analytics supports cross-media attribution, such as search, display, video, retargeting and more.