According to Wired, “While not surprising, the move would bring Google’s search engine into the social networking era, while simultaneously creating a new avenue for blackhats to manipulate search results and potentially incurring the wrath of trust-busting authorities.”

This does raise a couple of questions that I’m sure that Google engineers and management are grappling with right now. First, is that for years Google has spoken about its “hands off” approach and letting the algorithm do all of the work. The manual manipulation of a social media button would have many implications as to the manual manipulation of rankings.

And, also as has been previously mentioned, black hat SEO’s will be busy at work trying to game the Google +1 system if this does have a large impact on rankings. This could have the opposite effect of how the search giant is intending it to be used.

On the positive side, however, it would give users a vote in filtering out spammy sites from the SERPs. How many times have you done a search and wondered why this or that website was at the top of the rankings when it should be on page 20?

From a user perspective this would be positive to be able to push up the quality sites in the rankings and thereby pushing down the lesser quality sites. So, the intent is good. We’ll just have to wait and see if there are enough checks and balances built into the system to add to or subtract from the user experience when implemented.

But, then I started thinking that if I were Google, what would I do? This is not as easy as it sounds. I just watched a video (I can’t recall where) of Matt Cutts stating that Page Rank was not all that important and that Google has over 200 other pieces to its ranking algorithm that helps it rank pages accordingly.

So, if I were Google and wanted to thwart the spammers, keep the SEOs off-balance and generally deliver excellent rankings I would take a few steps. Here is some of what I would do:

• Deliver inaccurate or incomplete results in the green PR bar of the Google Toolbar. This section is given too much weight anyway by the community, so what is the motivation to keep it accurate?
• Since there are only so many tools in the bucket in which to use to rank a page (on-page and off-page) I would periodically place some of these tools outside the bucket such as devaluing the weight some directories or social media sites. Or another idea is to devalue the sites for a while, hide the PR and then silently add them back into the algorithm.
• In addition, since there are only so many tools in the toolbox I would periodically swap the priority of the tools in order to keep those who wish to manipulate the rankings off-balance.

Anyway, those are my top 3 WWGD ideas. What would you do?

Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, has been around since 1999 making sure the homepage of Google stays clean and yet is user friendly. The Google logo may change depending upon what special holiday is upon us or someone famous is having an important birthday but then it snaps back to the old logo again.

Along with Google’s new brighter and more colorful logo they have actually introduced a bit of clutter on their results pages. Now, when you do a Google search there is a bit of real estate taken up on the left side for a tab that says, “Everything” with a More below it and a tab that says “All Results” with a More Search Tools underneath it.

Google is attempting to give searchers more choices on how to search, putting a more powerful choice at one’s fingertips. Yahoo found out that when given more choices users tend to stay on the website longer and report a better overall experience.

It’s a fine line that Google is treading. One the one hand what makes it so attractive is the lack of clutter and the superior organic results it delivers. On the other hand, some people will want more powerful tools and options.

My hope is that Google stops the clutter creep. One of the original reasons people turned to Google in the first place is that Yahoo and other search engines websites were too crowded other information. Yes, I’m old school and prefer the Original Recipe Google to the Extra Crispy version.

In the past Google has rolled out click to call on their Maps section for local businesses. The search giant also introduced Google 411 service at 1-800-GOOG-411 in order to help consumers find local business via their landlines or cell phones.

Now, Google has decided to offer click to call through their Adwords ads delivered to the iPhone, Palm and Android phones. What this means is a cell phone user searching Google will see ads with a phone number. Users can then click on the phone number, which is routed through the Google servers for tracking and connected the business’s phone.

The business placing the ads only pay when someone clicks to make a phone call. And both business owners and their SEM’s know how important tracking is. Google click to call is yet another way to connect consumers to local businesses that otherwise may be lost.

Historically, Google has been at odds with search engine marketing and optimization companies, so some have been screaming conflict of interest since the DoubleClick acquisition. Critics have been concerned about possible insider information going from Google to Performics that would help in the rankings.

Performics is now a 10 year old company with around 200 search engine marketing specialists onboard. In order to abate these calls, this is a deal that needed to be done.

It’s a pity though that this deal is going through as I am just getting used to receiving the Google Performics emails about new advertisers coming onboard.

But, when the speed of serving those 30 results slowed down the search, the searches dropped by 20 percent. So, in essence the visitors wanted those 30 results on a page but at the same speed as for 10 results per page.

Mayer pointed out the same results for Google Maps. When the search giant cut the size of the maps by 30-percent, the searches increased by 30-percent. The faster load times meant people were willing to stick around and search more (plus click on more ads).

But, Google does not only require speed from within, it requires speed from without as well. In recent months Google has hinted that the bounce rate of websites may be a ranking factor in the SERP’s. This means, the faster a web page loads and the longer visitors stay on the site before leaving, it is assumed that this page is of interest and merits a higher place in the search engine results pages.

So, the bottom line is that Google requires speed from itself and speed from the websites it links to as well. With speed, visitors stay interested and get what they are looking for quickly. Perhaps at one time even Keanu and Sandra were hired as the “need for speed” consultants to help improve on this concept.

But, as with other services the online search giant offers, Google Backup will presumably be free. Now what will this mean, if this rumor happens to be true?

First, there will a rush of individuals and companies wanting a free remote backup service who are currently not using one or who are using one but want to discontinue paying for the service. Remember when Gmail rolled out and blew away Yahoo, Hotmail and other online email services in regard to storage?

The Google Backup service could push other paid services right out of business. Or, there may be enough people with Google trust issues who will continue using the other services regardless of the price.

Now, what will Google do with all of your data that it is storing for you? First, hopefully encrypt it so that even if there were to be a breach, no one would know what to do with your valuable information. Second, will Google take a peak at your data before encrypting it so they can study individuals and businesses at a micro-scale? This is anyone’s guess right now.

But, if Google Backup is in fact a new service coming soon, expect the privacy advocates to throw up a red flag and expect those not so concerned with privacy to flock to this new offering. Get ready to pack up and make way for Google Backup.

Knowing this would be a hot button issue, Google addressed the privacy issue in the first bullet point, “Google Health will protect the privacy of your health information by giving you complete control over your data. We won’t sell or share your data without your explicit permission. Our privacy policy and practices have been developed in thoughtful collaboration with experts from the Google Health Advisory Council.”

The idea behind Google Health is to have a secure online storage facility for private medical records. A family can store its records of illnesses, prescriptions, vaccinations, procedures, and blood tests in one easily accessible place. Health records can also be imported from a few participating health providers as well.

One of the benefits of this kind of storage is that a patient can decide ahead of time to let a doctor or hospital (or anyone else) see this information in times of emergency. Some have called the storage of medical records online, though, the “wild, wild West” when it comes to privacy concerns. This unchartered territory is tempered with third party privacy audits starting in June that will help quiet some of these fears.

It remains to be seen whether or not Google Health will add to Google wealth by advertising medical supplies, pharmaceuticals or other revenue sources in the future.

This is why Google Friend Connect has just been introduced on a limited basis. As part of the OpenSocial program, Google Friend Connect will help Webmasters provide communities on their websites for their visitors.

Visitors can bring their friends along from Facebook, Orkut, Linkedin and a few other social sites or they can meet new friends. Right now, bringing friends along with you on the Web is a fractured endeavor at best. The Internet is full of a few large coffeehouses where friends connect rather than a road trip or night on the town where friends can travel to several meeting places back to back.

Google Friend Connect will start off simple with user reviews and ratings, but will grow and expand with input from the OpenSocial community. Right now Google is taking applications for the waiting list. You can expect to see this app grow in momentum in the weeks and months ahead.

The observation has been that web pages that had previously been number one in the rankings were all of a sudden thrust into the number 61 spot in and thus the name. Now, because of the introduction of Google Sitelinks, this penalty is more obvious.

There have been a few occasions where authority sites occupying the number one position with Sitelinks have all of a sudden dropped to the top of the seventh page of Google results. The theory is that Google has penalized these websites for using spammy techniques on-page or for buying links from other sites.

The use of spammy techniques such as hidden text is a no brainer. Don’t do it. But, if indeed a website is buying links from other websites this is more troubling. This is troubling because how do we know these links are bought and not bartered for, or part of the business owners other properties or worse yet, part of sabotage from a competitor?

If this penalty does exist from the buying of text links, then the potential exists for competitors to manipulate each others page rank by buying links that point to the opposing website. This open door to negative SEO means the SERP’s may be damaged delivering more irrelevant results due to manipulation.

A few months back Google was asking users to tattletale on websites that buy links. Let’s hope the Google -60 penalty is not the result your nearest competitor but rather something that each web business can fix if it chooses to do so.