Google Launches Interactive Google+ Badges for Publishers in its Platform Preview Program

Just a few days after the launch of its business and brand pages for Google+, Google today announced the availability of a set of dynamic badges. These new badges allow publishers and brands to allow their readers and users to subscribe to their new pages directly from their own websites without sending them to Google+ first. For now, this is a limited release, however. Only users who are part of the Google+ Platform Preview group can create these interactive badges for now.

Google, of course, is working on hard an making Google+ as ubiquitous as possible – even in the face of stories that already decry its impending death. Besides releasing these new badges today, for example, Google also announced that it is adding Google+ buttons to image search results.

Here is the badge for this site. Feel free to add us to your circles if you haven’t done so already:

So how do you get one of these fancy new badges for your Google+ page? First, you have to join the Google+ Platform Preview group. Then, head over to the  configuration tool for the new badges, choose the one that fits the size of your website and copy and paste the code into your site. There are two parts to this: one piece of code has to go into the of your site and another is the actual badge, which goes wherever you want it to appear on your pages.

Perk for Those Who Install the Badge: You Now Qualify for Direct Connect

One perk of having the badge installed is that this qualifies you for inclusion into Google’s Direct Connect program, which means potential visitors to your site can now search for +your_site_name on Google and immediately find your Google+ Page.