Content Recommendations for Mobile Websites Via Google+

Google+ is being further integrated into your web surfing via content recommendations, making your web surfing more social. This update is great for content creators and readers alike as readers find more interesting content to read and share with others.

Easily find new content to read directly from mobile websites.

The content recommendations are always based on the specific page the reader is viewing. That means if you're reading an article about Google+, you should not receive a recommendation to read a completely unrelated article such as one about baking cakes. Also, the recommendations are based on other signals such as activity on Google+ (+1s and shares) as well as Search Authorship of the writer. Although the recommendations are highly integrated with Google+, they'll appear to users not signed up or signed in. Those that are signed into Google+ will receive the added benefit of seeing the +1s and shares from others in their circles.

In order to make it unobtrusive to the reader, the gray bar only appears as the reader scrolls up and disappears as they scroll down. Also, the recommendations only appear if the reader taps on the gray bar for more.

How to Set It Up

With implementing one line of javascript on your mobile website being the only coding needed, setting up content recommendations is relatively quick and simple. The rest is handled through a rather intuitive dashboard for your Google+ page. The dashboard is located under the "for your site" section.

Mobile Recommendations Dashboard

Through the dashboard, you'll find the setup code by clicking on the "get setup code" button. You'll also be able to choose which pages you don't want to recommend and which pages you don't want recommendations appearing on. Finally, you can choose when to display recommendations.

What do you think about the update? Is it something you'll add to your website?

Source: Google+ Developers Blog