Earlier this week Google announced a major update for logged in users that they dubbed “Search Plus Your World”. SEO’s and Social Media Marketers almost immediately reacted negatively to the news viewing it as an aggressive push for Google’s own social media network. Protesters claimed it is destructive to the current social websites enjoyed by hundreds of millions of users around the world and disruptive to the natural organic rankings that Google is so well known for.

Danny Sullivan has been covering the issue from the moment the word was announced and has sided solidly with the rest of the industry. However, Google is not backing down. Matt Cutts Tweeted about it and Google had read-write-web cover the launch. Some have said it effectively just made Bing the best search engine; others have hailed it as big step forward for the search giant.

If you’re a website owner you probably don’t care about any of the arguments about the open web, how this ruins Google’s credibility, how creepy it is that your privately shared content is now showing up in search results, how this might attract more attention from the FTC or how this makes it harder for Eric Schmidt to tell congress that Google doesn’t have other products besides search. You probably just want to know how it might affect your ability to market your website and gain traffic in the search engine.