Google + (plus) Shutdown Scheduled For April 2019
Google is shutting down its struggling social network sooner than expected in the wake of a new security issue that affected over 50 million users.
In early October, the company revealed that a security bug had exposed the account information of 500,000 users, including their names, email addresses and work information. At that time, Google planned to shut down Google Plus by August 2019.
Google recently announced another bug that allowed the profile information of 52.5 million users to be viewable by developers, even if the profiles were set to private, using one of Google’s application programming interfaces, or APIs, for six days in November. Once again, the available data included information like users’ names, email addresses, occupations and ages. With growing user concerns, Google decided to shut down early.
If your website has links pointing to Google Plus, now is the time to begin removing them. When it comes to SEO, many people are still concerned about the consequences of Google+ shut down on the visibility of their website. This is highly unlikely. Unless you have a website that solely relies on Google+ to promote your site and connect with the audience this shutdown should not affect you or your business.
