Do Twitter and Facebook effect organic SEO?
It has been something bubbling away in the background for some time now. With Google‘s “real time” search results, which in my option has proven to be fairly non descript. It was obvious from the start any ranking factors that should deem a result as being worthy were not being utilised as effectively as they could be. Over the last year there has been an increase in “Social signals” or “conversational marketing” methods, but until now it has not be thought they could influence your organic SEO results.
Google and Bing have announced that they do have an algorithm that can influence your rankings. Bing have said they do look at the social authority of a user, and Google have said they take into account how many people share an article, and the author authority.
What factors is it likely that are being taken in to account?
I have read lots of positive and negative opinions of these latest announcements. Many people are concerned that the more Google gives away the more people are likely to abuse the algorithum. I don’t believe that is the case. In any area of business you are open to those who will use unethical practices, but all to often we end up with clients here who have fallen victim to poor practices, you might get away with it for a while but you wont be sitting pretty for long. Social Authority (as Bing refers to it) is going to be open to manipulation, people buying fans, likes, tweets, but in the long run this is no benefit to anyone, it will only add to the internet being un-trusted source of information. I can’t see the big search engines allowing that to happen.
For those of you in it for the long haul, you should be looking to apply the same principals to building your “social authority” as you do into building your SEO campaign, quality friends and followers across your social media accounts, building your authority and intern earning the following of high authority users, similar to traditional link building methods for organic SEO passing value from one user to the next. Just in a slightly different way…
