The Google+ Links Left Behind

Closing as of today

Google+ for consumers shuts down today, on the date Google announced in January. Profiles and pages are being taken down, and Google has said deleting all the content will take a few months.

For most businesses, the account was abandoned years ago. What remains is the trail of links to it: the red icon in the website footer, the line in every email signature, the address on a box of business cards.

Each of those now leads to a notice that the service is no longer available, or soon will. None of them leads to your business.

Where the old links are

• Social icons in the website header or footer.
• Share and +1 buttons on blog posts and product pages.
• Old posts inviting readers to follow you or join a community.
• Email signatures, one per person, each set up separately.
• Newsletter templates and automatic replies.
• Printed material, from business cards to the van door.

The fourth is the one that lingers longest. A signature is set up once on each computer and phone, by each person, and nobody ever looks at their own signature again.

What a dead link tells a visitor

A visitor who presses a social icon is usually checking whether the business is active. A closure notice answers that question badly, even when the business is thriving.

It suggests nobody has looked at the website for a while. Visitors choosing between two businesses weigh small signals like that, rarely consciously.

And the fix is quicker than almost anything else on a website, which makes leaving it harder to justify.

The website first

Start with the icons, since they appear on every page. In most themes they are set in one place, such as a theme options screen or a footer widget, and one change removes them everywhere.

The share and +1 buttons that sites embedded were switched off ahead of the closure, and some have left a gap in the layout where the button used to sit.

The code that loaded them is still in the page, and it can come out.

There is one place visitors never see. Many sites list their social profiles in hidden code that tells search engines which accounts belong to the business, and the Google+ address should come out of that list too.

Old posts and pages

Links inside the content are harder to spot, because they sit in posts written years ago. A post from 2014 inviting readers to join your Google+ community still says so.

Whoever maintains the site can search the whole database for the Google+ address and list every page that contains it, which takes minutes rather than an afternoon of clicking.

Most of those links can simply be removed. Where a sentence only made sense with the link, rewrite the sentence or point it at a page on your own site.

A worked example

A roofing contractor with three crews had been on Google+ briefly in 2014, when a marketing company set up a page and posted to it for a few months.

Five years on, the Google+ icon was still in the site footer, the address was in the signature of everyone in the office, and the cards printed in 2015 said find us on Google+ beneath the phone number.

The footer icon took two minutes to remove. A search of the site found the address in four old blog posts and in the hidden profile list, all fixed the same afternoon.

Everyone updated their signature from a single version circulated by the office manager. The cards, still most of a box, are being used up rather than thrown away; the reprint will carry the website address instead.

Email signatures and templates

Signatures are the most scattered part of the job: one in each mail program, on each computer and phone, for each person.

Write the new signature once and send it round, so everybody ends up with the same version rather than five variations of it.

Then check the newsletter template, the footer of automatic replies, and any quote or invoice templates that carry a row of social icons. These are easy to miss because nobody at the business ever receives them.

Print, vehicles and signs

Printed material cannot be edited, and it does not need to be thrown away. A card with a dead Google+ address still has a working phone number.

Change it at the next reprint, and use the occasion to make a rule: long-lived print carries your own website address, not an address on somebody else's platform.

Vehicles and signs deserve the most care, since they last longest. A decal naming a social network is a bet that the network will outlive the van.

Replacing it with something you control

The lesson of the day is not to swap one platform's address for another's. Platforms change, close, and alter what a business page can do.

Your own domain is the one address you control. Put it on print, in signatures, and anywhere a link is meant to last.

Where you show social accounts, list only the ones you actually use, perhaps from a single page on your own site that links to each. When the next one closes, that page is the only thing to change.

Your Google My Business listing is a separate product and carries on as before. So does Google+ inside G Suite, for businesses that use it internally.

The counter-case

Some businesses have almost nothing to do.

A business that never had a Google+ page, or removed the icon long ago, can stop after a quick search of the site and the signatures.

And printed material can wait for its natural reprint. A dead address on a business card costs little, since the phone number beside it still works.

For everything that is easy to edit, though, today is the day: remove the links and point people at an address you control.

This week

1. Remove the Google+ icon from the site.
2. Take out old share buttons and their code.
3. Search the database for remaining links.
4. Clear the hidden profile list as well.
5. Send everyone one updated email signature.
6. Check newsletter and invoice templates.
7. Put your own domain on the next reprint.

Step five is the one that reaches the most people. Every email the business sends carries the signature, so a dead link there is in front of customers every day until somebody changes it.

What to keep from the account itself is covered in saving what you posted on Google+.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.