So at the beginning of the month I made a post about how Google released it’s plus one button for Websites. This button is now showing itself globally on the SERPs over at Google as of a day or two ago.  Only time can tell if Google’s plan will execute well. I suspect that it’ll work out well, despite the large negative attitudes of many online marketers, SEOs, Social media fanatics, and developers.  The +1 button is just like any other button except it’s for Google.  Every other button has shown some level of success, and with Google taking social signals from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, it would only make sense for them to have their own internal social signal.If you don’t care about the Google +1 button, this post may still interest you. June has been a busy month for Google, and with June just about over, this “round up” post will give you the need-to-knows about the search Giant.

Below is an example of Google’s +1 in the SERPs.

On another added note, Google has updated the toolbar at the top of their homepage. It’s now a black horizontal bar with fairly dark text. There was a bit of outrage over at Webmaster World, though I’m not sure why people get so fixated on such a minor update. It’s not like Google nuked anybody’s website…  Finally, today I also noticed that Google Profiles received a new Tab for “Videos” – it use to just be About, Photos, +1, Buzz. I guess this is another step towards “socialized Google” that they’ve been talking about the past year or two.

Google Profile, June 2011

View my Google Profile

Besides for adding new services regularly, sometimes Google has to decide to throw in the towel on less popular services. Google recently announced that it’s adding another product to the Google Graveyard.  Google Health is now on it’s way out the door, it’ll be closed out officially at the end of the year.  I know many of you probably have never even heard of Google Health, as it’s been one of Google’s less prominent services over the past few years.

More about Google!

Google has recently updated their toolbar PageRank. It comes roughly 6 months after the last update, and about 3-4 weeks after Matt Cutts mentioned something about a PR update coming. A few notable changes:  Twitter is still a PR9, Facebook is still a PR10, Google’s homepage dropped to a PR9, W3.org is down to a PR9, and Adobe is also a PR9 (down from PR10).  I know that Google wants us to downplay PageRank because it’s not nearly as important for ranking as it once was, but it’s still a measurable value and shouldn’t be ignored (just don’t get obsessed with PageRank). We also all know the PageRank can be a method to “prove your worth” – I use PageRank, Alexa rank, and Domain Authority (SEOMoz) as a way to quickly judge a website before diving in deeper.  Many people use PageRank as a way of judging how much they should charge for any link sales (of course, anytime you sell a link, you really should make it NoFollow – but not everyone does this).

Google is once again in trouble with the Law

It must be nice to have a billions of dollars to spend on increasing infrastructure, hiring geniuses, creating a classy yet fun work environment for all of your employees, and paying off the local governments to stay out of trouble. This is pretty much what many of us have come to know and expect from Corporations. We see it all the time with tax breaks, white-collar prison, and other unjust ways of handling the wealthy.  I just find it appalling that the company whose main slogan is “Don’t Be Evil” is constantly in the papers for violating local laws in several Countries around the globe.  You’d think with as much information as Google has, they’d be able to realize that they were violating laws. On the other hand, Google tries to win your love by releasing excellent products with the price tag that we all love ($0.00 USD), and tries to downplay their evil-doing by releasing Transparency reports so we can see just how much snooping our governments do on a yearly basis.

This just about covers most of Google’s major headlines for June, but there’s still a few days left for them to squeeze in another violation or update.  Only time will tell!  If I missed any other major events involving Google from June, hit me with some links in the comment section below!