How Google Looks at Social Media

Last week Google announced updates to Social Search, a feature that makes it easier to view information posted or shared by the people in your social networks.

The search engines are increasingly looking to social media for cues on how to better tailor their results to the needs and interests of users. If you’re wondering how social media is impacting your organic search engine rankings, please read on.

Google is currently looking at social media in 3 main ways:

1) If a person logs into Google, the search engine might give higher priority to things his or her friends have posted or shared. This is called Social Search and it does not affect the general search results that non-logged in users see. Since this affects only personal search results, it’s not something that businesses can directly influence other than to make their content easily shareable or tweetable.

2) Google is also incorporating tweets, videos, etc. into the Universal results format. To ensure that your company has an opportunity to appear in these listings, it is important to maintain active social media accounts and to build social authority by being a trusted user. This has always been the case, and is unrelated to Google Social Search.

3) Lastly, Google and other search engines are looking at social signals and author authority as ranking factors. This involves detecting which links are becoming popularly shared and if they are being passed along by authoritative users. Again, to leverage this for SEO, businesses should make their online content easily sharable and should maintain active accounts that can help gain the attention of other authoritative/influential users.

See, We Told You Doing It White Hat Is the Only Way to SEO

For those of you who missed the wonderful article by David Segal in the 2/13/11 New York Times business section on JCPenney's foray into black hat optimization and Google's response to it, be sure to pour a cup of coffee and read Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets slowly.

What's really validating for the team here at DBE is how we've helped our clients win in the search engines through "Real" SEO--the kind that takes strategy, patience, great content, and the expertise to know when something is "too good to be true."

SEO not an overnight success, but it does consistently work and the results tend to be long lasting. Real SEO is an investment in strategic marketing that works with the rest of the marketing mix.

We have seen repeatedly that Google does seem to have a church and state separation between its natural listings and the paid ones. That being said, I find it hard to believe that Google knew nothing of JCPenney’s efforts. I also cannot believe all that SEO only delivered 7% of JCPenney’s traffic. It had to be much closer to 60-70% at a minimum for the period of time they were showing up for every imaginable search, unless in addition to spending money on a bad optimization program, they failed to invest in the right web analytics and CRM tools too.

Facebook Pages Upgrade

Facebook is upgrading company Fan Pages to look the same as personal profiles. Starting this week, companies and brands may take advantage of the opportunity to be among the first to upgrade their Pages. All pages on Facebook will appear in the new layout beginning March 2011.



This is an exciting change because it opens up new opportunities for networking on behalf of your brand and offers increased controls for Page admins.

Notable features include:

Latest photos appear across the top of your page:
The most recent photos that you post to your Wall or photos that you tag your Page in will appear at the top of the Wall. This area will not include any photos posted by your fans (unlike on personal profiles where your friends’ tagging updates this section). To hide a photo, roll over it and click X.

Show the Top Posts on Your Wall:
You now have 2 Wall filters. You can show posts by your page and top posts from Everyone, a new way for people to see the most interesting stories first. As an admin, you'll have additional filters for viewing posts on your page. To set a default filter for your Wall, go to Edit Page.

Use Facebook as Your Page:
You now have the flexibility to interact with the other areas of Facebook as a page, rather than having to use your personal profile name. You can also get notifications when fans interact with your page or posts, see activity from the pages you like in your news feed, Like other pages and feature them on your page, and make comments as your page on other pages. To use this new feature, go to Account and select Use Facebook as Page.

New settings:
You can set defaults for your email notifications and how you post to your page - as yourself or your page. You can also select which featured pages appear in the left column. To manage your settings for email and posting preferences, go to Edit Page and Your Settings. To select which pages appear in Likes, go to Edit Page and Featured.

Since Facebook is now sending email alerts for new postings on Pages, you can also set keywords as a Moderation Block List. There is also a Profanity Filter which can be set to None, Medium, or Strong.

The downside is that Tabs are now less visible. They’re minimized as links in the Left sidebar. These are really only meant to be landing pages for first-time visitors to your page or for Facebook Ads – otherwise it is unlikely that many fans will click over to view them.

For more information, read Facebook’s official notice regarding the change. To see an upgraded Facebook Page in action, visit Digital Brand Expressions' Page at http://www.facebook.com/digitalbrandexp.

Google and Bing Debate

Some of you might have heard about the latest Google vs. Bing debate. For those who haven’t, here is the background:

1. If you have opted in for IE8 Suggested Sites or installed Bing toolbar,





From its privacy policy http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/privacy.aspx on Suggested Sites,

“When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with standard computer information. "
"To help protect your privacy, the information is encrypted when sent to Microsoft. Information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included.”

This means Bing can get your Google queries and Google search results.

2. Google now claims that Bing has been using this and copying its results and using it in as a ranking signal in its own search results.

Google manually ranked sites for 100 different gibberish search terms that had no results in Bing or Google. 20 engineers then installed the Bing toolbar and performed searches for those gibberish terms using Internet Explorer, clicking on the page they'd previously manually ranked at the top of their own results.

In 9 of the 100 tests, Google claims they started seeing the site they'd manually ranked show up ranked #1 over at Bing.

3. Bing says it is one of 1000 signals they use.

We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.

4. Google’s engineer Matt Cutts asks

If clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th (or some other trivial fraction) of Microsoft’s relevancy, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? And if Microsoft is unwilling to stop incorporating Google’s clicks in Bing’s rankings, doesn’t that argue that Google’s clicks account for much more than 1/1000th of Bing’s rankings?”

Looking at the hundreds of our client site results, we don't see that Bing and Google's search results are close enough. We also wonder, if clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th of Bing’s relevancy, why not just stop using that data and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? We will have to wait and see how Bing reacts.