Benefits of +1ing a Sub Page vs. Root Page

[Hakkasan]

Say I'm on Nike and I +1 a soccer shoe page...does the Nike root page rank higher/for more terms for my google+ followers or would just the soccer shoe page?

[jennita]

Hi Dylan! So I'd definitely say that having people +1 a specific page is going to be useful because it will show up in the SERPs if it's relevant to the query. However, check out this post from Rishi: How to Get a Celebrity to Endorse ALL You Products on Google. He shows where Aaron Wall shows up as +1ing the UK ebay site, but he never did. He did however +1 the US site. So Google is showing his +1 for essentially any page on the subdomain.

Major takeaways:

1. He DID plus eBay.com, and NOT .co.uk. Google merged it to the .co.uk domain.
2. He later REMOVED his plus. Google ignored the fact.
3. He plussed the root domain. Google indicates that he plussed  the SPECIFIC Ad Page.
4. Its false endorsement, manipulated by Google.

In other words, it may not even matter! Hope this helps.

Jen

[Hakkasan]

Thanks! your logic makes sense, it is how I figured they would handle the situation. But +1 has been out for a while now (a while being relative to the fast paced field of SEO). I'm just surprised no one has done a study on this yet. (*hint SEOmoz)

[shoggoth]

Not sure, there is already a (data) valid answer to this, but maybe this gives you a clue:

if you +1 something, Google should normally know, who you are, what you searched for and how you reached the page.

So in a first layer - the +1 should only be really important for that specific page and its verbatim.

Given that a site generates a lot of +1s for different pages in time and in a specific topic (soccer shoes, basketball shoes, and so on) the positive ranking of those subpage could/should be inherited by the upper roots...and finally by the root domain.

But that's just my assumption on how I expect Google to handle this - there is no real data available out there yet...