In a December 1, 2010 “Search Engine Land” article, What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?, author Danny Sullivan interviews Google and Bing about the effect social media (primarily Facebook & Twitter) is having on search engine optimization (SEO). In short, the interview makes it official that social media does in fact affect SEO.
Important Social Media-SEO take-aways from the article:
- Twitter and Google Pagerank: Google rates each Twitter account with a Google Page Rank (see PR Checker to check yours), which means those Tweeple with the highest Google Page Rank potentially have a better chance of being indexed by Google over those with lesser Page Ranks.
- Twitter Social Authority Ranking by Google and Bing: Social authority may be ranked on such variables as follow to follower ratio, author quality (whether they are public figures, those who regularly blog, etc.), etc. Of course the exact calculus behind such formulations are kept secrets.
- Links Posted To Social Increase Referring Webpages’ importance: Website links being posted from Twitter and Facebook Fan pages are evaluated by both Google and Bing. Social media managers should therefore be conscious of the number of social links referring back to targeted web pages, along with¬† the source and context of those links.
- Link Cross-Referencing to Determine Authority: Apparently Bing cross references links sent from Twitter with those being sent from Facebook (or vice-versa), to determine social authority and subsequently indexing importance.
Although it’s no surprise that both Google and Bing indexes social media posts, it is important to note that social media is best used for both SEO and engaging your audience. If social media managers take this information to mean that social media is all about using SEO keywords and website links in their Twitter and Facebook Fan page posts, they will be missing the point of social. Social is at its heart about engaging and interacting real-time with others, whether they be friends, target market, fans, etc.
Also, social posts have a very short half-life, in terms of people seeing them and search engines indexing them, which is another reason why social media management might as well be social. Who wants to sit around all day and post to the Internet anti-matter, when there’s social shuffling to do.
To re-cap on how to use social for SEO: post relevant material often, use relevant links and keywords, don’t spam, and engage without smothering!
