The impact of social signals on web search results is growing swiftly. All major search engines including Google and Bing now use the social signals as one of the factors that influence the search results.
With the introduction of Google+ social media service and Google +1 button to share the content Google reaffirms the importance of social sharing and its influence of search results. So what does that means to webmasters? Do we need to take steps to make our content more popular on social media?
Importance of Social Media Branding and SEO
Social media services like Google+, Twitter, Facebook etc acts as a medium to share interesting content. The Google+ social media service and the recent introduction of Google+ Pages indicates the importance and the influence of these social media services on search rankings.
Influence of Social signals on Search Rankings
The trend started last year and Matt Cutts revealed that Google uses the Social signals most importantly the Twitter shares that influences the Search Rankings. Google+ now uses the +1 share between Google+ business pages and across the Google+ profiles as a signal that influences the search results. In fact this is a localized form of search results. Bing also uses social media signals from services like Facebook and Twitter to streamline their search results.
Customized Search Results and Importance of Authority, Quality and Reputation
When you do a search after logging into your Google profile, the search results what presented to you is a customized results based on the contents shared by your friends and networks.
This indicates that your SEO activities now cannot ignore targeting these localized signals. But rather than the count the quality and authority plays an important part. That means the authority of the account and the overall reputation is important
Similarly the Twitter signals plays an important part and the impact of Twitter shares on search results depends on the authority of the Twitter account and the reputation of the shared content.
As mentioned by Danny Sullivan, who you are as a person on Twitter can impact how well a page does in regular web search. Authoritative people on Twitter lend their authority to pages they tweet. Google and other search engines consider in terms of ranking influence is not just the number of followers you have but the quality or the authority of those followers and friends. If this is not the case then “social spamming” will definitely become the next headache for Search Engine bots.
Binu George , the author of Globinch.com, is a technology blogger and software architect. You can follow him on Twitter, Google+, Facebook.
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