Facebook, Twitter and SEO are now interralated: It’s official - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

This week, two representatives from Google and Bing shared an interview with one of the SEOMoz team members, and needless to say dropped a bit of a bombshell on search marketing after clearing the fog on one of SEO’s most vague of topics.

Do Facebook and Twitter, with their respective social authorities, have a an impact on SEO? The answer has been confirmed as yes.

It’s a revelation that has been a long time coming. After months of speculation after hearing of Google and Bing’s decision to buddy up with Twitter, and Google’s hint towards giving Facebook profiles more prominence in search results, a lot of us could see the possibility of the rumour becoming a reality – but we could never be certain.

In search engine optimisation, knowing the technical element of the practice made us a little skeptical towards acknowledging that search engines would one day let social authority influence search results – primarily due to the easy levels of manipulation that came with it as baggage.

But that’s exactly it. The answer is how the major search engines have coined the term, and how this term is to be literally applied to SEO.

‘Social/Author authority’ is something that both Google and Bing have deemed as having a legitimate influence on what users want to see when they’re searching for topics of interest, or trying to locate recorded conversation.

And regarding the influence on SEO? You’re only interested to hear about link weight, right? Well, let’s put it this way. Google and Bing are only interested in measuring signals indicative of ‘author quality’, implying that any link shared will be evaluated based on the impact of its context.

Something kind of like this:

One can envisage that the link weight would be calculated by things such as timing and relevancy, the surrounding content, the diversity of resources and even the level of engagement – but as to how the search engines calculate these factors, we can only speculate.

It looks likely that for now, the only way for a shared link in a social context to have any impact is for the user sharing it to be a powerful author/creator.

Google has even stated that author authority is independent of PageRank, however is limited to what topics of relevance it is applied to in search. It will be interesting to see how this kind of thing develops, however for the time being, unless you’re CNN or Ashton Kutcher – your social profile ain’t gonna have much of an impact!

But think about it… If a search engine were to try and identify and give value to a link placed within a viral context, how would it determine the link’s authority? Here’s a few interesting points:

1. You’d need to be the most popular kid in school – They’ve pretty much given this one away already, but for your link to be considered even remotely authoritative, the social profile through which you’re sharing it will need to be exceedingly popular. This is because the more users you have engaging with your social profile, the more human credibility you’re given. Google has always been about giving the users genuine material, search results that are generated by humans and targeted at humans. Bing also follows suit. It just makes sense.
2. The profile of the people interacting with you – If you are perceived to be a big fish, interacting with a pool full of sharks, then there’s going to be a lot more emphasis placed on what you say, and who you say it to. This would be a quintessential part of calculating author authority.
3. Reciprocity – The frequency of interactions and exchanges between profiles, who you are interacting with and who is interacting back.
4. Relevance of what you’re talking about – This one’s a no brainer. It needs to be relevant to something being searched.
5. Who you’re writing for – Obviously if you’re only out to give yourself a pat on the back, then the search engines aren’t going to regard your social commentary as important because you’re not contributing anything of objective, unbiased value.

What do you think?

to us, it’s clear that the major search engines are continuing their push towards more contextual organic search results. The good news is that its a significant step towards cleaning up search that is heavily populated by spam and artificial websites, the down side on the other hand, is that whist there will be a vast number of human-edited resources available, they may not always be as informative as intended.

For example, if I’m searching for a clear cut guide to caring for tropical fish, then I’m not going to want to have to dig through a whole heap of social conversation around the subject just to locate a solid answer to my question.

However, if I’m looking for experiences in caring for tropical fish – the vast availability of valued opinions is going to benefit me greatly, because I’m going to want to hear about what people have to say, and these guys will, too

As for online marketing, it may very well be time to sit down and re-assess your strategy, because the bond between SEO and social media just got even closer.

Yes I know – it’s been a while since our last Banana Peel of the month. Things here at Ziller have been a little crazy to start the year, however we are now back and ready to continue into 2010. To kick proceedings off – welcome Bing.com – our March Banana Peel of the Month.

If you are not aware of or have never used Bing, it is a new search engine which was developed by Microsoft and was launched in May last year with serious intentions of taking on the big giant Google. During the launch Microsoft’s chief executive officer Steve Ballmer was quoted:

“Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions”

What a joke.

When Bing was launched, I was looking forward to seeing what Microsoft would come up with and how they would make search better. Now, just the other day I swore I would never use Bing (or Yahoo for that matter) again.

We were launching a clients website for beta testing and during the transfer to a new server, there were some server related coding issues we came across. Naturally, we tried ‘Googling’ the error code as we know it is one great way to solve a problem as often users out there have faced the same problem before and have either blogged about it or posted on a forum. Google returned pages of relevant search results to the problem, however we did not find a solution right away so thought we would go and perform the same search at Bing.

What Bing returned in the serp (search engine results page) amazed me. It’s first 2 or 3 pages returned websites that actually had the same problem. By this what I mean is that the error I was searching for was so common that many websites out there were actually down due to this very same error, they showed a white page with error output – obviously of no help what so ever to me.

When I performed this search at Google, Google was smarter enough to understand that I was searching for a solution. Google returned forums, blogs and websites that discussed the error, while Bing and Yahoo returned only sites that actually had the error. Google still returned these sites in the my search, however they were on page 4 and 5.

Google knew what I wanted and delivered it, the others didn’t.

Sorry Steve, but so much for finding information quickly and using the information I have found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions. Fail.