When it comes to social media, Google’s attempts to get involved have not exactly been gamechangers. However, we should not compare Google Buzz or Wave to the bigger, better Google+. The more versatile and popular network has finally learned to exploit the biggest advantage that Google has over Facebook and Twitter: integration with Google’s other services.

This means Google+ buttons on Gmail and Reader, integration with Chrome, and most recently, Google+ content showing up first in Google search results. But is Google’s so-called “Search, plus your World” feature something that makes social networking easier, or is it going to become a nightmare for Search Engine Optimization experts around the world?

We recently asked Plum Tree’s SEO experts what kind of effect they think it will have. Their opinion? Either it will be a big failure, OR they’ll essentially force people to accept it as a part of the new Google environment. The new, “personalized” Google+ search results will show up before organic search results and even before paid advertisements. This will make it harder for SEO engineers to optimize content, given that results pages will vary largely from user to user, depending on how active they are on Google+.

Over the last few years, one of Google’s goals has been to add “trust and authority” to search results, based on recently shared and trending content. Link building—that is, getting people to link to your content—has always been one of the biggest ways authority is determined. However, what will change is how Google determines the quality of the source that the link comes from. In other words, getting someone to link to your content on Google+ is immediately more valuable than a link from Twitter or Facebook.

Another huge impact Search+ will have on SEO is increased loss of keyword referral data. Ever since last year, if you are signed in with your Google account and perform a search, the keywords you search with are encrypted. Now, this might sound good for many people, but for SEO experts it means that a certain percentage of keyword traffic data show up as “(not provided)” in their Analytics platform. Originally, this percentage was only in the single-digits, but with so many people now logged in to Google Plus, many have now reported these numbers to be above 20%.

What this all means is that, if you want to leverage Google+ to optimize your content, it’s not enough to simply have a Google+ account and be posting content there—you also have to be well-connected and shared by many other Google+ users. As “Search, plus your World,” grows and evolves, we’ll start to get a better understanding of just how big of an impact it could have.