1. What are the ramifications of including or not including the canonical reference? I understand that Google may want to "de-duplicate" a G+ post from its identical blog mirror post, but if my blog becomes an aggregation point for my online content, as an author I would want the Google+ post to be the one demoted, not the post on my blog, where all traffic related to my content should aggregate.
2. Do you anticipate being able to use +Google Analytics to properly measure traffic and engagement on G+ posts? It's very nice to migrate comments to my WordPress blog along with the post, but Google Analytics does not track or credit any of the views of the post on G+. PR firms and brands use Google Analytics statistics to determine whether or not a blogger has influence, so the lack of statistics for either G+ or the same posts mirrored to a blog deeply degrades the value of activity and posts on G+.
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tagging in to follow.
Curious on the "canonical reference". To be honest, I've never been sure what that means, or how that relates to the URL tag in the template. So …
+Dave Hill As I understand it, you can specify in HTML that the content came from somewhere else, so a search engine knows where to go for the original copy. But since visits to Google+ are not registered in (or at least not visible in) tools like Google Analytics, I'd much rather have the traffic go to my WordPress blog, where I can get full credit for it.
There's a potential downside if you duplicate-post to multiple sites and Google Search interprets that as trying to spam, but I'd rather make decisions based on my needs as a content creator, and leave the burden on Google to figure out how to fix algorithmic issues in Google Search.
+Jeff Sullivan Ah. I suppose that makes sense. Thanks.
Hi +Jeff Sullivan,
As far as canonical referencing for posts from G+, I haven't been able to notice much impact either way. For me on my blog, I don't add a canonical reference because in my mind my blog is the authority for the content, it's just that I also like to post it on G+ in a format that is easier to read (and it happens to go there first).
I have not noticed any deduping penalties for anything for the content that has gone across, nor have I heard about issues from any others. This isn't to say that the next Google update won't target things like this, but search is a constantly changing landscape.
Personally I love analytics so I would be ecstatic if Google would give access to more details right down to post details. I'm really not holding my breath as far as that goes though, and if they do end up releasing such details it will more than likely be constrained to Pages (for the business aspect) or marketed as a tool to sell advertising (like Facebook does). It would be very unlikely that such stats would be available easily via the API.
We can always hope though.