Google +1’s and Search Rankings

There’s some debate on SeoMoz / Hacker News. I thought I’d share my experience, since it seems in conflict with the two main arguments.

The first being what the correlation between Google+ 1’s and search ranking is, the second being that Google just wants everyone to write quality content.

Here is a chart from the last eight months of this site, you can see readership increasing over time, with large bumps from things that did well on Reddit, HN, G+, Twitter, etc (usually one, but not all of the above). These range up to 50-100 twitter/g+ shares:
traffic

Google Analytics has this nice “Social Media” chart which confirms the same story:
social

At the same time though, you can see the “Search impressions” and “Search traffic” charts are pretty much flat:

webmaster tools

search

The lesson I’d take from this is that writing good content is important, with the beneficial effect of making Google irrelevant, as, in my case, it’s now the source of ~10% of my readers.