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Posted by dani cass on January 14th, 2011

Over the last few months, the team at Impact Web Solutions have noticed quite an increase in the number of clients requesting links on their website to social networking profiles. Social networking is now playing a major part in how companies are interacting with their customers, not only allowing them to share product and service updates, but also making them more accessible and giving additional points of contact.

Given this social networking surge, I was pleased to read in an interview conducted by Danny Sullivan with Google and Bing a couple of weeks ago, that search engines are now taking social networking into account when determining ranks for regular search results.

It seems the most beneficial social networking site with regards to Google and Bing is Twitter. Now many people will be wondering about the no follow links that Twitter add to links and how they can gain reputation if there is no ‘link juice’.

Well, Google and Bing have ‘human signals’ they use to determine if someone is deemed to be an authority or trusted figure on Twitter. Individual pages on Twitter are given their own page ranks much the same as regular websites, and when a profile with a higher page rank shares a link to a website they give their authority to that page helping it to gain a better reputation.

Google and Bing also receive what they call a ‘fire hose’ of data from Twitter, a constant stream of tweets and these don’t carry the same no follow links, meaning that links in this stream do actually give some link credit to the website. Bing also takes into account how many times a link has been tweeted or retweeted.

Links shared and ‘liked’ on public Facebook accounts and groups are treated in much the same way as tweets although Google confirmed they do not have personal wall data from Facebook. Due to the privacy restrictions on Facebook, Bing confirmed that they do not give authority to profiles because some information isn’t public so they cannot calculate how authoritative a user actually is. Bing also confirmed that they cross reference links shared on Facebook against Twitter and if the same links are shared in both places it helps to verify the legitimacy of the link.

Ensuring that you are an active participant on social networking sites, talking to your followers and following them back are great ways of increasing your page rank and authority with search engines. By creating and sharing relevant content and links, you increase your chances of being retweeted, again increasing your authority and giving more value to your links.

I mentioned in another blog post about the predictions that future ecommerce websites would be more social based, with users relying on the feedback of other ‘real’ people and the importance social networking sites will play in increasing traffic to websites by sharing links with their friends. This revelation from Google and Bing indicates that the future of search engine promotion could move in a similar direction, relying more on ‘real’ people to weed out the spam sites and create more reliable, content relevant search engine results based on recommendations that have been shared by users with greater author/social authority.

Google Realtime is already providing a live stream of tweets containing search terms, as well as ‘Top Links’ that are being shared and a list of all mentions meaning that social influenced search results may not be all that far away.

We are excited to see the direction these developments take. Let us know your thoughts and comments regarding social seo via Twitter @impactwebsolns

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands