Google +1 Button Spotted … And It Works [Er, Worked]

Mar 31, 2011 at 3:23pm ET by Matt McGee

Even though Google’s +1 button isn’t supposed to be ready for webmasters for a few months, they’ve already been spotted in the wild — and they appear to work.

Yvo Schaap points to Fanity.com, where a +1 button has been embedded in a social widget next to Facebook and Twitter buttons. (See image at right.)

Schaap says he did some digging into Google’s code and “found the button endpoint hiding from me, obfuscated, in a stray piece of javascript.”

I’m not a code wizard, but (assuming I get it right) here’s what the button should look like for this individual story URL. (C’mon, +1 it — you know you want to.)

And after you +1 it, do a Google search for this article and see if the +1 icon shows as active on your search results.

We have an email in to Google for reaction and, specifically, to find out if they plan to disable the code that makes these buttons work.

Postscript: The buttons now appear to have been disabled from Google’s end. See Zapped: Google Votes -1 On That +1 Button.

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: +1

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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Meg Snyder

FYI – I +1 ‘d the article but did not see the +1 icon in my Google search results for the article.
http://www.kkti.com JVRudnick

tried myownself Matt, to get same to “register” but nada….least not yet.

but I’m sure it will….oh…never thought, but as I’m a Canuck maybe we are not “part” of the testing when our IP is Canadian as yet….

Oh, and NICE catch too….

:-)

Jim
http://www.webtrapic.com/ bkcox

Clicked on it but got a red exclamation point over the +1 sign afterwards.. The count looked as if it went up, but immediately back down to the # it was before I clicked. Wondering if they are only registering ‘pluses’ for google accounts its been rolled out too.. Wasnt on the SERPs either.
http://www.stareclips.com/?twitter Bob Bigellow

Doesn’t work in special circumstances. Remove the /u/1 in the URL of the iframe in your code, and it should work better.
http://www.sweetspotmarketing.com S.S.M.

Seems to work better in Chrome that Firefox.

I clicked the button and then reloaded in Firefox and the old +1 button image loaded a small corner of the SMX banner from the top of the page. Danny might be thanking you for the traffic right now :)

Chrome gives the red exclamation point.
Adele Tiblier

I still spy a snippet of a Google 404 page.

I also tried it within multiple browsers, and ‘no go’. Seems its still in beta for a reason, or the folks at Fanity.com have some issues with adding iframed content to the page.

Excited to see how we can incorporate this into our search strategies, but for now, it stays on the back burner until we can really sink our teeth into it.
http://www.tomanthony.co.uk Tom Anthony

It was cool whilst it worked! Looking forward to the real thing.

In the meantime… an alternative approach, which isn’t as slick but is still working: http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/googles-plus-1-vulnerable-to-clickjacking/