In the social media age, it’s inevitable that with each new innovation comes a marketing question. Google ^[1]’s Plus is barely three weeks old, but already, marketing experts are trying to assess its future impact on SEO. And while three weeks is not nearly enough time to analyze the effects of Plus, there are some clues about the ways in which it could affect marketers and their strategies, says ReadWrite Web’s John Paul Titlow.

Titlow says there are indications that the impact could be “substantial,” given that Google includes the +1 button on Google Plus posts as well as next to every Google Search result. Additionally, Google Plus could influence search rankings since social factors are already “baked into” search engines. This was something Google learned from watching how Twitter’s tweets and re-tweets affected page rank. The effect was like turning on a firehose. And although Google has since plugged the Twitter hose, the impact was not totally diminished.

Still, given Google’s previous Wave roll-out, it’s probably a good idea to experiment a bit before making any broad proclamations based on short-term observations.

Read more at ReadWriteWeb ^[2].