After three years, Google has ended its real name policy allowing users to sign up without using their real name when they register with Google+.

Whilst this has always been a wildly unpopular policy it was originally put in place for a very good reason. Making people use their real names when setting up their Google+ accounts ensured that it was a ‘community of real people’. Unlike other platforms that were full of fake profiles, Google+ had only legitimate users on its platform.

Historically this was the main reason that Google’s search engine algorithms favoured Google+ interaction as one of the metrics used to measure website popularity via social networks.

In hindsight, the writing has been on the wall for this change for a while as Google already allows pages to have any name, and recently opened up migration of YouTube usernames into Google+ accounts.

I think it will be very interesting to see how things change from an SEO perspective now and we will of course be keeping our eye on things here at One2create.