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It still helps with social proof. Everyone can see the number on the site.


It probably does, but 50 plusses aren't very impressive. You'd have to buy thousands of them in order to appear viable. And even then, most people who are able to recognize a high "plus" ranking would probably be sophisticated enough to recognize a spam site instantly anyway. This kind of reminds me of those weird sites with a button on them displaying 3 million likes on Facebook and when you look at the actual source code, it turns out they embedded the widget with "example.com" as their site address.

Fifty ClickMob accounts on non-social sites are worth a lot more, for a short time you could totally dominate sites like HN, Slashdot and Reddit. But Google+ accounts that are not connected to relevant people, I just don't see the value...


It could also be or become a ranking/search quality signal in aggregate.

Google may also show aggregate +1's in their search results in the future (so social proof right in the search results):

>>And even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1’d your local coffee shop.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/1s-right-recommendati...

>>For instance, your +1 could appear as part of an anonymous aggregated count of the people who have also +1’d the same thing

http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&#...




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