Google+ +1 Numbers Decreasing On Brand Pages

Have you noticed a drastic drop in your Google+ brand page +1 numbers? You aren’t alone.

This morning while reviewing our social channels, we noticed a 384,000 drop in Search Engine Land’s +1 numbers that appear below the logo. Yesterday, it was over 409,000 – today only 25,000. Luckily, the number of people and pages who have you in circles, a little lower on the right side of your profile, is still at 366,000. However, 25,000 plus 366,000 still don’t add up to 409,000. So, what’s going on?

We checked with our contact at Google, who confirmed that this is a known issue, and there is something going on with the way the numbers are counted and combined, and it should be resolved soon. Unfortunately, as of November 2012, we can no longer see +1 metrics in Webmaster Tools, so we have to sit tight and see if the numbers bounce back.

In the past hour, the Marketing Land Google+ page has been affected, decreasing from over 14,000 to 2,874.

Have you seen fluctuations on the brand pages you manage?

UPDATE 1:58 PM EST: +1 metrics to brand pages seem to have returned to normal for many, it seems that the glitch was short-lived.

About The Author: Monica Wright Monica Wright has over 10 years of media and content marketing experience, with a strong focus on driving online audiences for media companies. She serves as the the Community Editor for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land, and regularly consults and speaks on SEO, social media, and local search techniques. You can follow her on Twitter @MonicaWright. See more articles by Monica Wright

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James Starkey

Saw a drop of over 100,000 this morning… The good thing? We clearly weren’t the only ones!
Andrew Johnson

My page’s +1 count decreased from 681 to 18 on Monday, but now it looks like it’s back at 681. I’ve noticed this same issue happening off and on over the past year.
Jared Frasier

One of my pages dropped by 4 and the other by 7. Feelin’ kinda lucky right now…
http://steveplunkett.com @steveplunkett

less spam.. #justsayin
http://www.facebook.com/tarwara99 Sunil Tarwara

Why does Google not update page owners on it?
http://www.LeadDiscovery.com/ Jerry Nordstrom

Kind of glad to see we’re not alone!
All of our sites have been fluctuating. Here is what is odd:
On our Google+ Profile LeadDiscovery.com has one number It used to be 67 – now 15
On our website home page we had 67 but now have 7
And still different numbers for http://www.leaddiscovery.com and another for leaddiscovery.com (not intended to be a link drop but as a pointer to a real example.).

I understand that different pages receive a different count, however I thought the root address / and the root with default page address /index.php would be treated as the same?