The +1 Button Is Like A Button You Push For A Treat — Without The Treat
Without The Treat — You people confuse me. — Ten days ago we put Google's +1 Button on TechCrunch — because why not? We try basically all these new buttons/counters/commenting systems much to the dismay of our precious page load speed …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's +1 button arrived on third-party websites on June 1, roughly six months after it was accidentally revealed in a leaked screenshot in December 2010. TechCrunch installed it anyway — its habit of testing every new button and commenting system at the cost of page-load speed — and ten days later delivered a verdict: it is a Like-style button with nothing behind the click, no counter, no visible reward for the person pressing it.
The critique lands against a specific backdrop from this month's corpus: Google held 65.5% of US search share in May per comScore, and Matt Cutts confirmed the Panda 2.2 update was imminent. Publishers therefore have a rational reason to embed +1 regardless of whether readers get anything out of it — the plausible payoff is a ranking signal, not a user-facing feature. That tension between user value and SEO value is what makes the piece more than a product gripe.
First-order effects
- Publishers testing +1, TechCrunch included, are paying real page-load cost for a control that gives clicking readers no immediate feedback, so adoption currently runs on faith in future search benefits rather than demonstrated engagement.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's Like button, which showed a working counter-and-feedback model as early as its 2009 share-count era, sets the benchmark +1 must match; if clicks do not visibly translate into search visibility under Panda 2.2-era ranking, publishers will drop the dead weight from their pages.
Third-order effects
- If Google ties +1 counts into ranking signals as the pattern suggests, recommend-buttons stop being reader features and become SEO currency — shifting publisher incentives toward optimizing for algorithm-visible endorsements rather than on-page engagement.
The trend: Search engines are converting share-and-recommend buttons into data-collection pipes for ranking signals, with publishers adopting them speculatively as SEO hedges rather than reader tools.