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.

In my last post I wrote about a few tips on using using the social networking tool Twitter.  Although this post was relatively simple and explained a few tips, I have receievd feedback that some people still don’t get what Twitter is about. They know kind of what it is and how to use it, but don’t really see the point. I found a good little video that does explain how Twitter works, and is well worth a look. Check it out.

Twitter is quickly becoming a very big and very powerful social networking website as more and more users start to embrace it. Massive in the U.S., Twitter is yet to fully take hold of Australian’s however according to recent stats this will quickly change. Sandra Hanchard a Hitwise analyst recently blogged how Twitter achieved a record usage in Australia for the week ending on January 10th.

Now even though I am sure most of you reading this post have heard of Twitter before, for many people there is still much mystery about it and exactly how it works. Put simply, Twitter is a social networking service that allows users to post updates, and receive other users updates by entering a text based post of no more then 140 characters, if you are on facebook It is very similar to updating your facebook status. You can follow users on twitter, and other users can follow you, you only see updates from users you are following, and vice versa.

Even though it seems really simple, there is a little more to it which I will try and explain here.

1. Updates

These are your standard updates. You log into twitter and write an update which everyone following you will see in their main timeline. When someone you are following writes an update you will see it in your main timeline.

2. Replies

If you start a update with an @ character followed by a users name, and then your message, this is called a reply. Its like talking to a group of people however addressing a certain person in that group. When you reply to someone, that user will see it in their main timeline, if they are following you. They will see it under their reply tab regardless of if they are following you or not.

3. Direct Messages

If you start a update with a d and then the users name, this is a direct message, and is similar to whispering – only that user will hear you. This will only work if that user is following you.

4. Links

There are times when you may want to post a URL in your update, however considering you only have 140 characters to work with, you may be able to see how this could become a issue, as many URL’s are more then 140 characters by themselves.  To fix this Twitter uses a service called TinyURL which automatically shortens URL’s when you enter them, so if you see a URL like http://tinyurl.com/bcajs4 you will now understand what it is.

I hope this post has helped clarify a few things. Ziller has a Twitter profile and if you are on Twitter do check us out. We will be updating with most of our blog posts and latest Ziller news.