Google+ Adds Content Recommendations For Mobile Websites

Website owners with a Google+ page will soon be able to add content recommendations to the user experience on their mobile websites.

Google just announced the new feature today, which blends both Google+ activity (such as +1s and shares) and search authorship to determine the best related content to show to users as they browse mobile website content.

Readers will see recommendations whether they’re signed in to a Google account or not. If they are signed in, though, they’ll see more personalized recommendations that involve content that was +1’s or shared by their people in their Google+ circles.

The feature works for iOS and Android, for the Android browser, Chrome and Safari.

There’s a video on that Google blog post that shows best how it works, but that video is inexplicably not on YouTube and doesn’t appear to be easily embeddable. (Weird. Google always puts its product/feature videos on YouTube.)

You can see it in action now by reading any Forbes.com article on your mobile device; and here’s a screenshot showing the recommendation in action:

Here’s how Google explains the feature on the content recommendations developer page:

Recommendations consider Search Authorship, Google+ activity (including +1’s and shares), and content on the visitors’ current page to keep the quality high. In all cases, recommended content is based on the visitors’ current page to keep the quality high. And they only appear when people tap for more, so as not to interrupt their browsing experience.

This feature is being rolled out now. Website owners will be able to access the code to make this happen by visiting their Google+ Page dashboard. The code will be available in the “For Your Site” option under the “More” tab. Website owners also have some configuration options, including the ability to turn recommendations off on specific pages and the ability to remove specific pages from being shown as a recommendation.