How Social Media Affects SEO

by Neil Patel

As search engines make deals with social sites like Twitter, it’s obvious that social media affects SEO. Matt Cutts, who works in Google’s Web Spam team, once said:

I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use “social” as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal.

But the question really isn’t if social media affects SEO. It’s more so on how it affects SEO, right?

The rise of Google’s social search feature

Now, before you think that the increased relevance of social search recommendations is some sort of new craze resulting from the launch of the Google Plus social network, consider that Google launched the first version of its Google Social Search tool back in October 2009 and rolled the service out to all users in January 2010.

If you look at the screenshot above from the launch, Danny Sullivan made a few interesting observations about this new functionality.
The first is that Google’s initial social search launch was rolled out as a separate tool, versus a full integration into a user’s main results page. In order to use the service, you needed to be logged in to your Google profile and actively access the “Social” feature in the navigation bar.
Danny also noted that the specific connections Google was recognizing to populate its social results pages included blogs in your Google Reader, any contacts in your Gmail/Gchat accounts and any contacts you were connected to via profiles listed in your Google Profile. For example, if you were connected to a friend through Digg and had listed your Digg account within your Google Profile, that friend’s content could appear in your social search results.

The implications of Google social search

Now, fast forward to 2011… not only are these social recommendations showing up on main search engine results pages, there’s evidence that they’re displacing results that would have displayed based on traditional SEO. And that an author’s authority on social networking sites is influencing traditional SEO.
Just for a minute lets consider the idea that social recommendations might shake up traditional search engine results pages through personalized search. In a test by Rand Fishkin, he noticed that when he searched “cupcake madness” while logged in to his Google account the results were different.
Logged in:

Logged out:

Do you know why the results were different? In the first image, the result from the Everywhereist blog shows up only because of Rand’s wife is the owner of the site. Once he logged out, the result is replaced by the site that earned the third place spot through traditional SEO.
The effects of this change are huge because if you only invested in traditional SEO you can be bumped from the search engine results in seconds. So should you even worry about conventional SEO anymore? Do things like backlinks, keyword-optimized content and on-page optimization still matter?
Although those questions are important, answering them doesn’t take into account the full impact of the newly increased influence of social media on SEO. To do that, you need to look at how Google and the other search engines are quantifying social networking authority as a ranking factor within the traditional search engine results page as well.

Author authority: The latest ranking factor?

In December 1st, 2010 Danny Sullivan interviewed Bing and Google representatives on how Facebook and Twitter may impact search engine rankings. One of the questions he asked was the weighting of Twitter users and links shared in their tweets…
Bing responded with:

We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results.

And Google responded with:

Yes, we do use [tweeted links and RTs] as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

And in response to the question, “Do you track links shared within Facebook, either through personal walls or fan pages?” the search engines had the following to say…
Bing said:

Yes. We look at links shared that are marked as “Everyone,” and links shared from Facebook fan pages.

And Google said:

We treat links shared on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links. We have no personal wall data from Facebook.

Based on their answers, you can assume that social media plays a role in influencing the search engine results by giving preference based on the authority of the author and the number of times a piece of content is shared on social networking sites.
In SEOMoz’s 2011 Search Engine Factors Ranking report almost 132 SEO and social media experts predicted that social signals at the page level and domain level would have a greater impact on search engine rankings than traditional SEO factors.

Specific social media and search engine integrations

Of course, it’s one thing to know that social factors are increasingly affecting search engine rankings, but it’s another thing entirely to see what integrations are already in place and influencing results pages. By understanding exactly how the search engines use this data, you can come up with a marketing plan designed to rank in this new socially optimized world.
The following are the integrations currently in place between the search engines and each of the big 3 social media sites:

Facebook

Although Facebook doesn’t make information stored on its personal profiles available for indexing, content shared on fan pages is fair game. In fact, according to an analysis of the data generated by TampaSEO, Facebook shares are one of the social signals most closely correlated with high search engine rankings:

And while the correlation doesn’t mean that Facebook shares by themselves lead to high rankings, it’s worth noting that Google and the other search engines also give preference to content shared on Facebook via annotated social search.
In the current Google Social Search implementation, content shared by Facebook contacts receives preferential positions in the search engine results, as well as with a picture of the person who shared it. By increasing the social proof of these results, Google increases the chances that this content will receive clicks.

Twitter

One of the clearest integrations between social media and the search engines is the Twitter Search Engine on Bing. This tool enables you to search tweets in real-time from within the Bing search engine. And with the recent updates tweets are now in the Bing News feed, as well as a preferred treatment for content “liked” by a your Facebook and Twitter contacts.
And while the ability to search for tweets via Bing may not send much traffic to your social networking profile, there’s evidence that tweets or retweets of links by legitimate users on Twitter can lead to a bump in traditional SEO rankings as well.
Jennifer Lopez did a case study showing that after a tweet introducing her Beginners’ Guide to SEO was retweeted by Smashing Magazine, she noticed an immediate impact in terms of both traffic and rankings for a previously un-tracked keyword.

Google Plus

As Chris Brogan said:

A social network made by Google impacts search.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. As a social networking service, as well as a search giant, Google has all the data necessary to implement changes to the search engine results based on social media. For example, they could hypothetically use the data generated by webmasters using Google Analytics, Webmaster tools, or their toolbar, plus the amount of traffic sent via social media sites by specific users. It’s not a big leap to assume that data from these services could be used to tie your website to authority social networking profiles and then increase your rankings.
And although evidence is difficult to come by as Google Plus is still new, you can already see the integration between the Google Plus network and the Google search engine results pages via social search annotations and the “+1” button that appears next to search results when you are logged into Google.

Conclusion

You need to get with the times and start expanding your presence on social media sites, instead of endlessly chasing the latest SEO tricks.
If you don’t believe me just think about the following quote from Matt Cutts in his keynote at Pubcon 2010:

Don’t look at us where we are today, but look at the direction we are moving and what we are focusing on, the big five are the mobile web, local search, social, blended results in the search engine results and HTML5.

Social media is impacting search engine results and if you want to get more traffic from search engines, you need to:

1. Build an active, engaged presence on social networking sites – this isn’t exactly rocket science… if social media engagement is a new ranking factor, you simply can’t benefit if you aren’t there. If you haven’t already, now is the time to build profiles on these sites and invest time in connecting with your followers.
2. Optimize your sites for social media sharing – if your sites are built on WordPress, installing a plugin like Sharebar to enable social sharing is something you have to do. Don’t rely on your users reading good content on your website and then taking the time to navigate to social networks to share it on their own. Instead, you have to provide them with the tools necessary to get the job done in the easiest way.
3. Encourage your readers to share your content – smart marketers know that assuming people will take the action you want without you explicitly telling them to do so is a lost cause. You have to use strong calls to action in your posts, encouraging readers to share your content via social networks if they found it useful.

And most importantly, this doesn’t mean you should give up on traditional SEO. In March 2010, The Register reported that only 20% of searches on Google were personalized, and although that number is growing, there’s no way it will be 100% of all internet users.
There will always be people who hate social networking or refuse to build the Google Profile. These people will only ever see the traditional search engine results, so you still need to follow all of the regular SEO best practices.
There’s no doubt that traditional SEO is slowly fading in importance when you compare it with the new social optimization indicators. So if you aren’t yet active in the social media world, you better start running because you don’t have time to walk.
How do you think social media will impact SEO over the next year?

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ICANN Approves New Domains (TLDs)

Ash Buckles,  July 2, 2011

The big news last month from ICANN is that .anything domain names, also referred to as generic top-level domains (gTLD) have been approved. This is a huge move for the governing body that has approved 22 TLDs, some of which are rarely used and almost never rank in Google, Yahoo!, or Bing.

Internationalization of domains

These .anything domains bring unprecedented international changes to domains where ASCII, Latin, Chinese, Arabic and other character encoding will finally be possible.

Domains won’t look like domains anymore

The changes alter the familiarity of Toyota.com or Nordstrom.com domain names. I imagine future domains more like corolla.toyota, camry.toyota, shoes.nordstrom, and so on. Notice the missing “http://” and the “www.” For household brands, this shouldn’t be entirely difficult for consumers. However, who will have the rights to .cars and .shoes?

Barriers to .anything domains

Will there be a whole new land grab of domain names? I believe the market will heat up for those interested in charging direct registration fees. Some control is built into the $185,000 consideration fee and an annual maintenance fee of $25,000 per top-level domain (TLD). This slows the average domain owner from creating domains at will, but how many domainers will have interest in controlling gTLDs? I believe many will explore this option.

SERPs considerations

As an online marketer, I can’t help but question how these domains will rank in the major search engines. You can see from the following examples that Google.com is indexing (not necessarily ranking) content from many different TLDs. But top rankings in Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Bing.com are rarely achieved by non-standard TLDs such as .us, .museum, or .pro domain names.



Search engines look at TLDs as an indicator of which index (country) they expect their audience to react positively toward listings. For example Google.com is full of .com, .net, .org, .edu and other TLDs whereas Google.com.mx and Google.co.uk are full of .com.mx and .co.uk domains respectively. This isn’t an argument over whether you “can” rank well, but rather an observation of Google’s defaults.

Schema.org and indexation of .anything domains

Another recent announcement by Google, Yahoo! and Bing is the support for Schema.org standards. With Schema standards, product information can be published with meta data to help recipients understand and boundaries provided by the publisher. This helps to organize the information of the web. Schema may help in suggesting the purpose, geography, industry, local/retail or global interest of new .anything domains.
As domains becomes less standardized (.com for commercial sites, .edu for educational sites, etc.) the search engine algorithms will have to adjust. Moreover, domain length considerations will have to be adjusted.
Changes to domain names also affects pre-determined standards such as .com for commercial sites and .edu for educational sites. The search engines will have to adjust their algorithm to account for new domains such as .baby, .bmw, .family, .motorcycles, .travel, and .vegas as they appear online.
I would like to hear your thoughts about generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and the changes required by search engines in order for there to be visibility of the new .anything domains from an SEO perspective.

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Statistics of registrars violating the ICANN domain name transfer policy

Statistics of registrars violating the ICANN domain name transfer policy

Posted October 2nd, 2009 by Robert Mathews in Industry Observations. Tags: domains, icann, policy, registrars, transfers.

In a previous post, I talked about how some domain name registrars have been violating the ICANN transfer policy for years, preventing domain name holders from easily transferring domain names.
I lamented the lack of detailed statistics about how many transfers each registrar rejected. However, it turns out that some of those numbers are actually available right on the ICANN Web site.

Those statistics show exactly how many “outbound” transfers each registrar rejected. Let’s take a look at the May 2009 “.com” statistics for the 5 biggest registrars in the world, keeping in mind that the transfer policy suggests that a transfer should be rejected only in very limited circumstances:

• GoDaddy: 7,855 of 26,475 (29.7% rejected)
• eNom: 262 of 22,724 (1.2% rejected)
• Tucows: 143 of 22,257 (0.6% rejected)
• Network Solutions: 889 of 17,242 (5.2% rejected)
• Melbourne IT: 35 of 37,746 (0.1% rejected)

(Our company didn’t reject any, but we’re much smaller and our numbers aren’t statistically significant.)
You can see that GoDaddy and Network Solutions reject far more transfers than the other three. In fact, GoDaddy rejects transfers at a rate that’s about 300 times higher than Melbourne IT and 50 times higher than Tucows. Network Solutions rejects about 50 times as many as Melbourne IT and 9 times as many as Tucows.
In other words, GoDaddy and Network Solutions are far more likely to say “we’re not going to let you move your domain name” than their large competitors. Remember, the transfer policy says that rejections are reserved for exceptional circumstances — but GoDaddy is rejecting almost 30% of them!
GoDaddy and Network Solutions claim they’re rejecting transfers for security reasons (although they both freely admit that “security reasons” include simple contact updates, even though the ICANN policy expressly forbids this). The actual rate of attempted domain name hijacking is almost certainly just a tiny fraction of one percent. Blocking 30%, or even 5%, is absurd.
The obvious conclusion is that GoDaddy and Network Solutions are intentionally inconveniencing domain name holders to make it difficult to switch to another company, and ICANN is letting them get away with it. (After my last post, I got a couple of “please send us the details” messages from people at ICANN, but nothing has happened since. Anyway, I’ve been sending them examples for years, and they could have done something about it a long time ago if they were interested.)
The fundamental problem is that ICANN doesn’t see itself as a regulatory agency. Some registrars routinely violate this and other policies that they’re contractually required to follow (trust me, you don’t want to hear my rant about the EDDP), but nothing happens to them. Is it any wonder that they continue to take advantage of it?
Most of the Internet does fine without any regulation because users have choice — they aren’t locked in to any particular company. But registrars are different. They need oversight because they’re in a position to prevent their domain name customers from easily exercising that choice.
I don’t have much faith that ICANN will fix this — in fact, part c of the new transfer working group charter suggests that some of the existing rules might be removed instead of being enforced. The very premise of that charter, that a “change of registrant [...] often figures in hijacking cases”, is utter nonsense, no more accurate than “e-mail addresses containing vowels often figure in hijacking cases”. Both statements are literally true but completely irrelevant. A change of registrant can never reliably suggest hijacking, simply because changes of registrant contact information happen all the time and hijackings don’t.
There’s nothing wrong with the existing transfer rules. Companies like Tucows, Melbourne IT and Tiger Technologies honor them every day. What’s needed is for all registrars to play fair.
In the meantime, if you want to have control of your domain name, you might want to avoid GoDaddy and Network Solutions and pick another registrar instead. We’re a fine choice if you don’t mind paying a little more for quality customer service, but there are plenty of other good choices, too.

Visit http://www.BackorderZone.com to start Backordering Domains Today and Do not worry about rejections if you choose to transfer your Domain.