[portentint]

I'm pasting in a comment I wrote directly on the Moz blog. Hope that's OK:

First: DON'T READ THIS ARTICLE AND START BUYING/ACCUMULATING CRAP Google +1 VOTES. That's not what Cyrus wants you to do. It's not what Moz wants you to do. And it'd be catastrophically stupid - you'll be providing direct evidence, directly to Google, that you're a spammer.

On second thought - go ahead. Fewer competitors that way...

The advice in the article about how to handle G+, and how to make sure you're taking advantage of the audience there, is spot-on. But the causation is definitely super-complex.

With G+'s healthy but still incomplete user base, Google wouldn't use G+ as a direct SEO factor. G+ does correlate, and strongly. But I think the reasons are:

Marketers know a lot about G+ and like to use it.

If your content is submitted to G+, chances are you have your SEO and social ducks in a row.

So the vast majority of content submitted to G+ already has a solid marketing strategy behind it.

And, Google does take G+ submission, overall submission velocity, user audience and the other typical social media metrics into account when determining how much a G+1 really matters.

The only reason I bring this up: So that folks reading this article don't go onto Fiverr and start buying G+ votes.

Like the Facebook kerfuffle 2 years ago, whether the causal link is direct or not doesn't really matter. A legitimate, popular G+ account, and lots of legit G+1's on content, are super-valuable for SEO, social media and overall visibility.

That's true even if your content has nothing to do with the marketing or other popular G+ niche industries, because there's a decent population of authoritative bloggers on G+. Getting in front of them is always good.