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.
One of my team accidentally deleted a client database, years ago.
I found out there were no backups.
The team member who deleted the db was completely stressed, of course. But my real anger was at the team's total failure to ensure we were running backups. Are you kidding me? If it wasn't someone clicking 'delete' by accident, it would've been a hard drive failure, or a power outage, or something similar.
And eventually I realized the blame lay with me. I was ultimately responsible for our backup plans, etc. - I hadn't given someone a clear direction regarding failover, redundancy, backups or security. I fixed it.
You told the story extremely well, and you handled it beautifully. There's no way anyone at that company had a right to blame you, or be angry at you, aside from the initial "WTF?!!!" reaction we'd all have.
Saying "You're lucky you're still here"...
The person who should've left was the CEO, not you.
The liars tend to win, because they make the superior claims. And for whatever reason, the customers can't give up on the idea that maybe this ONE outrageous promise, this ONE time, is actually for real.
It's like playing the lottery: Statistically you're better off running outside and screaming "THROW MONEY AT ME". But people still play.
Seems a little too clumsy for Google. I WILL say, though, that their PR handling of late makes them more vulnerable to this kind of BS. "Don't be evil" only works if you aren't, well, EVIL.
Thanks. I actually run a company - I have to constantly watch people and make the effort/results separation. Folks never understand when they get a negative review "for putting in 12-hour days." See, it's because you spend 4 hours/day running in circles.
In corporations this is a classic prisoner's dilemma: If EVERYONE agreed that they'd be sane and work optimal 40-50 hour weeks, it'd be great. But someone always 'defects', going to 80+ hours in an effort to show off. The result is actually lower efficiency, but since most corporations do very little track efficiency and results (they track effort, instead), it doesn't get caught.
It's all about time. You're writing an open-source project - I know SOME lucky folks get paid to do it, but not most - and you have to just get the damned thing working. Once you do, you have to go back to your job, or whatever else feeds your face. The UX has to wait. And wait. And wait.