As of yesterday, both Bing and Google have confirmed (via an excellent interview by Danny Sullivan) that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on rankings (in addition to the positive second-order effects they may have on the link graph). This has long been suspected by SEOs (in fact, many of us posited it was happening as of November of last year following Google + Bing's announcements of partnerships with Twitter), but getting this official confirmation is a substantive step forward.
In addition to that revelation, another piece of critical data came via yesterday's announcement:
Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?
Bing: 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. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.
Google: Yes, we do use it 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.
Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?
Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)
Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life :-)
Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?
Bing: Yes.
Google: Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.
We now know that those link sharing activities on Twitter + Facebook are evaluated based on the person/entity sharing them through a score Google calls "Author Authority," and Bing calls "Social Authority."
We can probably predict a lot of the signals the search engines care about when it comes to social sharing; some of my guesses include:
- Diversity of Sources - having 50 tweets of a link from one account, like having 50 links from one site, is not nearly as valuable as 50 tweets from 50 unique accounts.
- Timing - sharing that occurs when an RSS feed first publishes a story may be valuable in QDF, but tweets/shares of older pieces could be seen as more indicative of lasting value and interest (rather than just sharing what's new).
- Surrounding Content - the message(s) accompanying the link may give the engines substantive information about their potential relevance and topic; it could even fill the gap that's left by the lack of anchor text, particularly on Twitter.
- Engagement Level - the quantity of clicks, retweets, likes, etc. (if/when measurable) could certainly impact how much weight is given to the link.
We can probably also take a stab at some of the signals Google + Bing use for Author/Social Authority in the context of the sharing/tweeting source:
- Quantity of Friends/Followers - like links, it's likely the case that more is better, though there will likely be caveats; low quality bots and inauthentic accounts are likely to be filtered (and may be much easier to spot than spammy links, due to the challenge they find in getting any "legitimate" friends/followers).
- Importance of Friends/Followers - the friends/followers you have, like the link sources you have, are also probably playing a role. Earn high "authority" followers and you yourself must be a high authority person.
- Analysis of Friends/Followers Ratios - Much like the engines' analysis of the editorial nature of links, consideration of whether a social user is engaging in following/follower behavior purely out of reciprocity vs. true interest and engagement may be part of authority scoring. If you have 100K followers and follow 99K of them, but the engagement between you and your followers is slim, you're likely not as authoritative as an account with 100K followers + 5K following, but those followers are constantly engaged, retweeting, liking, sharing, etc.
- Topic Focus / Relevance - The consistency or patterns between your sharing behaviors could also be a consideration, using topic analysis, patterns in the sources of shared/tweeted links, etc. Being an "authority" could even be subject-specific, such that when a prominent SEO tweets links to celebrity news it has less of an impact than when they tweet links to a web marketing resource.
- Association Bias - I suspect Google and Bing do a good job of associating social authors with the sites/domains they're "part of" vs. independent from. Sometimes, this might be as easy as looking at the URL associated with the account, other times it could be based on patterns like where you most often tweet/share links to or whether your account is listed on pages from that site. Basically, if @randfish tweets links to *.seomoz.org, that probably means less than when I tweet links to bitlynews or when someone outside the company tweets links to SEOmoz.
These signals represent my opinions only, and while it's very likely that at least some are being used, it's even more likely that there are many more that aren't listed above. Over time, hopefully we'll discover more about the impact of social sharing on web rankings and how we can best combine SEO + social media marketing.
To me, the most exciting part about this is the potential to reduce webspam and return to a more purely editorial model. While people often link to, read and enjoy sources that link out manipulatively, very few of us will be likely to follow a Twitter account, friend someone on Facebook, or "like" something in a social site that's inauthentic, manipulative or spammy. The social graph isn't necessarily cleaner, but the complexity of spam is far lower.
Here's to the evolution of organic marketing - search, social, content, blogs, links - it's all coming together faster than ever before, and that's a very good thing for holisticly minded web marketers.
I'm going to have to dump somenon-authoratative friends ; )
While it is certainly remarkable to hear about yet-another factor used by the major SE's to determine organic rankings, I feel that we must take this once again with several grains of salt.
We don't have any data that suggests a significant impact of these factors on organic search. We certainly know that there are sites that continue to rank for highly competitive terms with little to no social media presence whatsoever. This would lead us to believe that SMO (social media optimization) is not necessary for rankings.
Don't expect to look to your twitter account as an SEO goldmine just yet.
Ciao Russ and thanks for reminding us to stay with our feet on the ground.
What you say is surely true, and I believe that no mind sane SEO will start forgetting the Link Graph and embrace the Social Graph just because of the interview on Search Engine Land, but what is interesting of the official news of the use of Social Signs is that it could point to a possible evolution and integration of both graphs, that is something - IMHO - that is needed to really show to the public the most relevant results.
And, well, you know too how much many of us (me included) love to start making theories due to our not so hidden conspiranoic nature ;)
Recency of links is a factor so regardless of whether it's Twitter or Facebook it's worthy of consideration. Over time I see the weights evening out in easily manipulated variables so that Google can avoid the system being gamed overly. Ultimately their goal is to provide relevant content and monetize the data/trends.
so when do the tweet brokers start? ;)
Balsam, Sheesh dont say anything unitl I annouce my new business model
I think social graph can be manipulated just as easily as the link graph. Likes, tweets, fans, reviews, ratings and facebook friends can be bought or sold. Contents can be shared in great volume through social media just like links can be bought. Mechanical turks can do this and have already started doing it. Review sites like tripadvisor is already infested with fake reviews. Many dodgy hotels and B&B are now heavily involved in this dirty business of scamming customers with fake reviews. And we recently have this case of 'decor my eyes' who was ranking high for tons of -ve reviews. This Google+bing open confirmation is only going to increase spam. Earlier spam was limited to manipulating the link graph. Now it will be extended to the social graph. No doubt social media marketing will become more powerful than ever but it will also give birth to countless dodgy consultants/companies around the world who will spam the hell out of social media to get reviews, tweets, sharing etc. With so many fake reviews, fans, ratings and bought links, internet may become a higly untrusted place.
This was my first thought as well. This news isn't going to reduce spam on the web, it's just going to increase it on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites.
It wouldn't be too hard to set up a network off 1000+ fake twitter accounts that all follow each other and automatically retweet each others links. While you're at it just create a fake, scraper blog for each and set each to automatically tweet the RSS feed from the blog. Bam! You've got 1000+ retweets a day all from twitter accounts with 1000+ followers.
This strikes me as fear-mongering and, frankly, a bit of condescension toward SEOs.
Twitter and Facebook have long been valuable traffic sources. But now, suddenly, because SEO people are leveraging them (instead of those pearly white hat social marketers), they'll suddenly become filled with spam? Bullcrap. Social media has existed for a plenty long time with hundreds of millions of participants. They've fought spam effectively and remained more "editorial" in citations and references, because no real person follows or friends a spambot on Twitter/Facebook (but as I mentioned in the post, plenty of people are happy to use websites that link manipulatively, so long as they also have useful content).
I also don't buy the "thousands of fake twitter/facebook accounts" propping up each others popularity. SEOs tried that on the web back in the early 2000s. We called it link farms and it failed miserably because no one linked to the islands of interconnected spam (and even if/when some legit sites did, it was never in a natural pattern).
I can imagine this shifting some behavior - yes, I'll be more likely to share more of my links on Facebook and Twitter. But I'm going to pull back hard if I see CTR dropping or friends/followers rejecting me. Likewise, I might try to seek out and form more connections, but those people are going to judge me for who I am and what my account does. No one's going to follow an account for long that does nothing but spew junk.
The social web has this great advantage in that it's more personal and more accountable. It's not some webmaster I've never met building hundreds of sites I might never visit that's propping up rankings. It's 50 of my friends who found a link/page/site valuable enough to share naturally. And for those who share junk - the onus is directly on them. Their friends and followers know that person/account is a spammer, and references, connections, shares, tweets to and about them will dry up.
They'll be clever loopholes and aggressive attempts, but I just don't see everyone's Twitter and Facebook streams filling up with junk. Sorry.
Ditto
Rand, I respectfully disagree.
Facebook has been pretty effective at fighting spam, but Twitter has been full of spammers for a long time. Many people who have a lot of followers simply auto-follow-back anyone who follows them, including spammers. I do. I never see their tweets because I read the tweets of the people I really want to see using lists. For that reason the comparison to link farms doesn't work.
Even though the attitude you describe is for sure common, I think that what you are probably missing about Twitter influence on Rankings is that it is to suppose that may count more the influencing quality of the followers more than the number of the followers.
Yes, it is true that normally Influencers have huge number of followers, but surely an Influencer does not follow spam accounts (and viceversa: spam account probably don't have influencers between their zillions followers) and don't interact with spammy followers*, and I suspect that SE know how to check it. In this sense, Authority profiles or TrustRank of profiles can be used by SE to discriminate the "good from the bad".
In this sense, probably my tweets and rt are more valuable to SE's eyes because I am followed by influencers even though I cannot be classified as an high influencer by myself, than the ones of a spam account.
Finally, I think that you are maybe confusing Social Media per se with Social Media influence in rankings, and I agree with Rand: as link farms were one easy to spot manipulation once, followers farms are easy to spot too (apart that on Social Media the report spam thing is stronger because of the same social nature of the environment).
* I have asked quite a few times, but none apart me did noticed that Google index DM?
>>what you are probably missing about Twitter influence on Rankings is that it is to suppose that may count more the influencing quality of the followers more than the number of the followers.
If you set-up 1000+ Twitter accounts that retweet each other, each one's followers would probably look pretty influential. Do you have 1000 followers who are each getting 1000 RTs a day?
>>surely an Influencer does not follow spam accounts (and viceversa: spam account probably don't have influencers between their zillions followers)
Not true. As I mentioned above, lots of influencers automatically follow back everyone who follows them. It would be easy to generate a list of 1000 influencers (people with 10k+ followers) who auto-follow. So, let's say someone sets up their 1000 fake twitter accounts to all follow each other plus follow/follow-back the those 1000 influencers.
Maybe I should do this as an experiment, to test the hypothesis. :)
And then all you need to do is set up some code or tweak an existing WordPress plugin to automatically post the link to Twitter when you publish a blog post, and it's completely automated.
I agree here Facebook is good at fighting spam but Twitter is full of it. I see it being used very manipulatively by so called Online Reputation Management Companies. I have seen some rotten content rank because of twitter manipulation. Twitter spam is especially effective for MSN
"Social media has existed for a plenty long time with hundreds of millions of participants. They've fought spam effectively and remained more "editorial" in citations and references, because no real person follows or friends a spambot on Twitter/Facebook (but as I mentioned in the post, plenty of people are happy to use websites that link manipulatively, so long as they also have useful content)."
Social media like 'forums' and blogs' have been abused as long as they have existed. People still spam them in a hope to get back links even when majority of them have nofollow links. This 'nofollow' tag reduced the spam a little. But this new theory of citations and social graph have given a good excuse to spam social media like never before. Going by your theory plenty of people will use website that manipulate social media, as long as they provide useful contents. And these days every serious business is providing useful contents, all they lack is social exposure and high rankings on search engines.
"I also don't buy the "thousands of fake twitter/facebook accounts" propping up each others popularity. SEOs tried that on the web back in the early 2000s. We called it link farms and it failed miserably because no one linked to the islands of interconnected spam (and even if/when some legit sites did, it was never in a natural pattern)."
There is no need to develop countless fake accounts when you can involve normal regular people to boost your social popularity. Link farms still exist but have become so sophisticated that it is hard to detect them even manually. Pay a reporter of a top notch newspaper/magazine a heft sum to write a good review about your product and then see the social boost (lot of tweets, sharing, likes etc).
"The social web has this great advantage in that it's more personal and more accountable. It's not some webmaster I've never met building hundreds of sites I might never visit that's propping up rankings. It's 50 of my friends who found a link/page/site valuable enough to share naturally. And for those who share junk - the onus is directly on them. Their friends and followers know that person/account is a spammer, and references, connections, shares, tweets to and about them will dry up."
Social web is advantageous as long as you have tons of friends across the world on social media who can give opinion/suggestion on every possible product or service you will ever buy (which is not possible). So you have to turn to the opinion of the strangers on the web who have bought similar product/service in the past. Here fake reviews/ratings come into the picture. How you can sepearate a fake review from a genuine review. Both are written by living breathing people and not bots. Fake reviews, spam citations is becoming a common problem in local business listings where reviews play an important role in ranking high. Reviews can be outsourced to 'reviews factories'. Here is one good post by econsultancy on this topic. Anyways i am not promoting smart spam here. I just disagree that this annoucement will reduce the web spam. The more Google become open about how it rank pages, higher is the probability that its algorithim will be abused.
I generally agree with the overall point, and I strongly agree with the final sentence. ANY info that Google gives users about how it ranks pages certainly encourages abuse.
I fully agree. @InfiniGraph has developed social affinity maps derived from consumers social interaction with other brand social interaction. What's this got to do with SEO - it provides the optimal keywords an audiance is linked with and what brands they are interacting around the most. We created a blog here that talks directly to the affinity maps. Influencer, Content Intelligence and Social Engagement and the 2nd is Fan Value, Customer Loyalty and Social Conversation
What we discovered is using the Twitter and Facebook affinities as well as crowd sourced trending content creates the optimal feed activation while directly increase the rank of the brand through twitter and facebook.
We're working on a post to address this topic and currently have clients using the social affinities for Facebook ad buys as well as Social Media Optimization.
@chasemcmichael@infinifgraph
SEO people are using Twitter and Facebook for years like everyone else or even earlier. So it's not like SEO people are flocking to Twitter and Facebook now and destroying them.
All things have good and bad aspect. So some time spammming done in facebook or twitter. And fraud are present every where in the world. So be cotious and feel the facility of Internet.
How does privacy mix between facebook, twitter and google. Is this something we can: "uncheck" ?
Thanks for posting. Curious, too, about URL shortners and their effect on SEO.
Retweet my tweet (that contains a lovely link) for a chance to win.....(insert giveaway).
This is some of the more exciting SEO news I've seen in a while. It's confirmation that there is real value in building an authoritative social media presence, and it provides a more direct link between social media and real revenue. There are a lot of organizations out there who still need that type of justification to get involved.
Now, the focus shifts to user authority metrics. My guess is that the metric they are using resembles PageRank on some level, with retweets and followers acting like links, passing value from one user to another (but not having much uniform value in themselves.) That would make it much harder to game the system - just as a huge link farm of new pages doesn't generate a high PR link in the end, a huge "user farm" built on the social graph wouldn't yield an authoritative account. Speculation, of course, but it makes sense.
Also worth mentioning... Klout is pretty transparent about the factors that they use in calculating Klout score (their metric for social media influence.) From my casual observations, Klout scores seem to be pretty sophisticated, so it might be a good extension of the list of metrics you've provided here.
(edited a spacing issue.)
Rand,
If I may humbly submit that the word "rankings" is being used out of context.
If you look at the reply to Vanessa Fox in the Mayday update report, she says "I asked Google for more specifics and they told me that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change...." (Google "Mayday update" and choose #1)
I would read this to mean that rankings = PageRank, crawling = visits to your site by the google bot, and indexing = search results.
When bing and google confirmed the influence on 'rankings' they meant PageRank. I have been monitoring a site that is several months old and can say that social media does affect PR as using over 99% of links on PR0 social media, including twitter and facebook pages I built my site to a PR4. However I do not see that PR has much (any) effect on indexing. Google does tell us that it is only one of over 200 factors and not to bother with it. (Google "Google Removes PageRank Data" and choose #1)
best,
Reg
nbs-seo.com
Great news! I think the next step to Facebook and Twitter could be turn the nofollow links into follow, this could make more sense in the Google and Bing searches if they really count on the social communities.
This is great news for both whitehat and unfortunately black hat too :(
I imagine this only affects rankings for serious trending websites right? What ever their method for this is lets hope they can keep on top of the spammers.
Well done Rand and team on the post. Thanks to Danny S. for asking the questions and getting the info. I also appreciated some of the insightful comments from other SEOmoz members.
My comment is this... I 100% excpted Google and Bing to be using these social signals in their algorithms. What I didn't expect is that they would announce it in 2010, and I didn't expect links from Twitter to be valuable considering shorteners and no-follows.
What I thought is that Google and Bing would incorporate strong social signals in 2011. I also expect Facebook to launch their own fully social search engine next year. I'm not big on self promotion, but I have to refernece a post back in August where I made some pretty strong predictions, one of which is the topic of this post (hope nodody minds the link): https://fluttrs.com/dancristo-58-580
Google and Bing and Yahoo the search giants like the social signals from last as we are observing from the last year.Twitter links specially emphasized on Google search...in terms of Facebook Bing emphasized the Facebook links.
Bing is giving much more preference for its SERP ,If you take a close look this days for Bing optimization you have to make links from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Blogs rather than website links.If you can make some links from Facebook like button page that will be countable in a good manner.
Bing search engine specially like the links from your friends and your social networks group those who speaks about you and your website.Apart from that After a collaboration between Facebook and Bing , those online giants trying to dominate Google’s SERP algorithm by introducing this special pattern.Also with this marge Bing is integrated the Facebook database for SERP algorithm.So its time to change the SEM strategy for SEO.
In my opinion this was an inevitability and anyone who was evangelizing social media early on was certainly pushing this. I think your opinions are spot on and are most likely the case here. Search and social continue to converge - throw mobile in that tossed salad and it makes for a healthy meal! Great post Rand!
To me, the most exciting part about this is the potential to reduce webspam and return to a more purely editorial model. While people often link to, read and enjoy sources that link out manipulatively, very few of us will be likely to follow a Twitter account, friend someone on Facebook, or "like" something in a social site that's inauthentic, manipulative or spammy. The social graph isn't necessarily cleaner, but the complexity of spam is far lower.
Agree totally... and it's a nice coincidence that the interview by Danny Sullivan was published exactly yesterday when here we were discussing about searchspam.
What I found interesting is not really that Bing and Google finally says they are using tweets and shared public links on Facebook in their Algos (well, I loved to hear it), but that the community were quite fast and exact in decrypting the main functions tweets and shared links could possibly have.
Some other reflections I've done:
1) Classic metrics may help compose the "SocialRank".
That is something also Danny Sullivan suggest; infact he wrote that PageRank of the profile page of a Twitter user could be a signal of the authority of the profile itself.
Using the Mozbar (and not being logged in Twitter), that's somehting easy to check: for instance my profile page has a mozRank = 4.22 and 432 links from 25 unique domains, and the Rand one has 5,60 of mozRank and 3.254 links from 357 unique domains. We can easily guess who of the two is more "popular", therefore "influential".
2) Metrics like TrustRank may help determine who is a real influencer and who's not.
I think that this is something possible, even though can be subject to exception especially in Bing, that affirmed in the interview that "label" some influencers by name (citing Danny Sullivan himself as an influencer whose tweets weight more than others).
Just for playing, it's funny to see how my mozTrust of my profile page on Twitter is bigger than the one of the "El Mundo", the most read newspaper in Spanish in the world: 5.87 vs. 5.73, while Rand profie has a mozTrust of 6.18
3) Not a reflection, but more a question without an answer: does Google apply some variation of its Sentiment Analysis System used in Blog/News in order to discriminate tweets?
Finally your conclusion: Here's to the evolution of organic marketing - search, social, content, blogs, links - it's all coming together faster than ever before, and that's a very good thing for holisticly minded web marketers. Love it and feel really as mine
Just checked my Twitter profile. MozRank = 3.43, MozTrust = 5.83 with only 18 links. Not too bad, I guess?
Day by day the waitage of twitter increases, so we hope that the twitter links will be dofollw link.
It's interesting to hear this just because new doors are opening for Social Media marketing. At the same time though, I'd rather not see this get too hyped up without more research and more detailed results to prove what Google and Bing had to say.
Take that guys who said "it's just QDF", and "Twitter nofollows links, so it doesn't matter for SEO"!
Glad to see it confirmed, and to have two more terms to throw around ("Social Authority & Author Authority -- someone please come up with some awesome clever acronym for this).
How about Augmented Social Authority, or ASS ?
I feel the same way... this is like vindication for each time I've had to defend the idea that social media is, or would eventually be, a ranking factor! :)
SAUTHA, kind of like a sauna, because those links have heat!!!
Reading this almost 2 years later and receiving a neg, I had to breakdown what I wrote.
Social AUTHority = SAUTHA
Silly play on words.
Regardless of the quality of my own creativity, it is good to know social links matter.
The important question is how much does it mattter? 5%? 15%?
Nice, it's good to know and "confirm" that social media had influence on the SEO.
Thanks for sharing.
Randfish, I agree that twitter and facebook does affect seo, simply because these are two of the biggest websites online, if you can get a backlink on them for your website. Or better yet build a huge presence on these sites, then the search engines will definitely recognize that. Kenny Fabre Internet Marketing
This should be a great opportunity for the horde of PR people who say they are in charge of social media marketing for their companies. But it also means they need to understand SEO in order to be successful. However, relatively few PR people have learned how Google News and Yahoo! News work, so the PR industry as a whole has got a lot of catching up to do before it learns how Google and Bing realtime search works.
I agree. Seo and Social marketers are no longer separate jobs... They are connected
I think it's a pity Google and Bing decided to tell everyone about this. Now the spammers will go into overdrive (and Twitter and facebook already have too much spam already!)
Hello... and thank you for the article. It was interesting to hear straight from Bing and Google. Do shortened URLs (e.g. bit.ly) have a negative impact on SEO? Or is the redirect ignored and final landing page is the only one counted?
This great news that Search engines are now confirming what most have us have suspected for awhile now.
Great post, thanks for this. We've certainly seen articles index quickly and rank particularly well when they've generated links from a few various users on Twitter.
Thanks for this post! It's nice to have confirmation of what we were all suspecting anyway.
I'm happy to see that my presence in twitterworld is not going unnoticed by Google and Bing - but no mention was made of Facebook!
How can we increase the flow of visitors ot the brand new Facebook Company Pages? I assume that the Search Engines would then pick up on that flow somehow...??
Social media channels like Twitter & Facebook are good places to share information and place links. I don’t think they influence the rankings directly –at least for now- but changes are coming, no doubt. Twitter could be faster than Facebook because the author authority quality, quantity and other “measurable” factors…
More people are getting involved on Twitter lately and are looking for “real-time” results on each search. Sooner or later the default page for Google and Bing could be the “Realtime” page, why not?
I was so first on this. CLAIM!
I guess it was already known in SEO community but Yes, Getting confirmation (by google and bing) is very good
Do you think being more active and having more momentum (tweeting more/linking more in fb) would be considered a signal (i.e. having fresh content) to a certain point? I believe there would be varying thresholds, depending on how much of an 'authority' someone is, for fresh content vs. spam. Also, to expand a bit on followers; a possible signal can be how active they are as well as how many followers they themselves have.
This would open up a whole new black hat gaming system... Anyone want to buy twitter links/Facebook links? 1k follower ... (I imagine it like this than the usual buy links with pr 4)
Great post, Rand. Between this and Danny's great interview, we finally have some validation to what we felt had to be true.
I agree with your assessment that gaming this won't be widespread. Certainly, there'll be those that try, but I think that the folks that expect it to be rampant aren't giving Google and Bing enough credit. Come on, folks! They're not a bunch of dummies. They don't start anything new without considering the effects of it in the wild. And that means they have a mitigation program in place from the get-go. It won't be perfect from day one, but you can bet it will be improved upon.
Let the lazy go out and set up a few hundred phony Twitter accounts, and then sit back and scratch their heads as to why they're not skyrocketing in the rankings. That kind of network is far to easy to spot and devalue.
Thanks for your perspective, Rand.
I was wondering if it would have a negative effect on my seo if I was to add the same twitter, facebook page, linked page to multiple websites. I have 6 websites for my construction business Chittenden Builders which all target specific aspects of my business and I currently have only one twitter, facebook page, etc... Will this have a negative effect on SEO if I add the same twitter, facebook, etc... links to all six websites?
One other aspect this underlies is that "networking" is critical to have true organic results (even though networking itself can be sometimes "artificial" in many respects). Asking people to tweet something vs. having lots of great friends (clients, customers, coworkers) either online or off say something about you though without even knowing it though comes from being a great networker & having great stuff to talk about.
Good article. It would be nice to get some new metrics on how they impact SEO in 2012...
The old guys are going to have to learn new tricks. We (I'm an old guy too), don't like "tweeting" and sharing our "feelings" on Facebook. There has to be an attitude adjustment and education as to the value of these social media elements. I'm glad I found this.
I'd be intrigued to see the answers to the social influential question now and differentiating between quantity and quality of followers. We put huge value in the analysis of accounts with tools such as Followerwonk, but anyone who uses it or other metric tools will be well aware of the types of accounts that can often be judged to have high authority scores.
I'm very skeptical of Twitter's long term usage as a curated ranking metric, at least as things are now. I think that it's going to be used, but my guess is that we will all be surprised, ultimately, how Google eventually incorporates Twitter into rankings. At the moment, it's just to easy to game. I wouldn't be surprised if social ranking metrics very much follow the evolution of linking ranking metrics. 1) pagerank-like algorithm based on number of users and importance, 2) eventually, people game this system, grow their user bases with fake users, 3) Google works for years to combat weird SPAM issues, 4) eventually it becomes less than 5% of the entire ranking algo and is a mere speck on the holistic get-rankings spectrum. I know this article is about three years old (wow I've been doing this a while), and I think hindsight even shows us that the first Bing/Yahoo/Google attempt at using Twitter and FB seems to have suffered a bit of a miscarriage. Moreover, since Google+ seems to have really begun to take foothold (or maybe that's just wishful thinking) my guess is that we start to see author metrics do a good job of verifying these accounts. it will be great when Google verifies Twitter and FB users as real through G+. A bit ironic, but great nonetheless.
Hi,
Great to get the news direct...
How do Google and Bing link your twitter account with your web domain?
Our website is www.sugarfreemedia.co.uk and our twitter id is sugarfreeltd. We tweet regularly, but not all day long. When I search in Google Realtime the only tweet that comes up for our company is the one that contains our company name in the tweet. That seems to imply that Google doesn't know that sugarfreeltd is the twitter account for Sugar Free Media.
I don't want to stuff our tweets with our name because I want to include useful information...yet it seems that this reduces our exposure.
Any thoughts / suggestions?
Thanks
Great article. I can't wait until we get more info on how strong the effects are. I have been trying to think of ways to incorporate this knowledge into client industries that really don't have a lot of conversation and whether Google and Bing are weighting the social graph vertical by vertical. For instance, how does a plumbing company benefit from the social graph without a large effort for community engagement. Most of the time I do not recommend Social media for these types of companies unless they are planning on integrating something to amplify like a chartiy barbeque or sponsoring events. Otherwise social media for non interesting companies becomes a megaphone rather than a two way communication. Thoughs on this would be helpful. It would probably be a better as a new post rather than starting an off topic conversation on this thread. Sorry for the ramble. Great post :)
P.S. As a pre new years resolution, I have promised myself I was going to engage more on twitter and linkedIn, and remove about 1200 followers from my twitter account from a couple years ago when I gave importance to the twitter follower arms race. Let me know if you want to connect and share insight @OrlandoSEO
Great article. I was thought that it did have some significance in search results even though it was never confirmed.
I'm sure they've been working to tweek their algorithms to analyze the sharing of links and information via social media for some time. To ween out the spam accounts.
Although I've just signed up for my account here, I've enjoyed this site for sometime. Well done.
I guess theres going to be an algorithm on the SEs to determine whether an Twitter account is 'natural' or spammy, just like on links. If an account only retweets about the same subject over and over again, theres probably some sort of automated action on that account. Bot=spam=exit
Nice Article!
I was focusing more on Twitter Facebook and all other Social Media for over 6 months now. I am feeling Great! I do believe the summary of this article will help me to do my job better for at least another year.
Thanks for your clear posts. I am just trying one twitter accounts for 2 domains in diffrent IP's. And also one facebook page account linked to 2 domains. What are the advantages of this to me. Are there any parameter or rule that can realize my fake ?
Thanks
This is a great article. Thank you for taking the time to gather the facts.
I have always suspected that there would be some kind of value in a Tweet, although it is clear that there would never be value in terms of link popularity.
I just did not think it would be possible for Google and Bing to ignore the social proof behind Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites.
This article helped me to verify in my mind what seems like it should be obvious. Thank you again.
I wonder if the Twitter and Facebook names play a part in this, possibly as the anchor text. Please reply here and/or to my blog post: Get Higher Search Engine Ratings With Twitter and Facebook
It would make sense to look for frequency of using hashtags for topical association and frequency of being named in a #ff #hashtag tweet to determine authority.
For example, you post often with #SEO and others tell people to follow you with an #SEO.
Thanks for the post
I own 700 plus twitter accounts. With google apps standard for $10.00 per year one is granted 50 email accounts. Point is My tweets are presenting in google search 1st page along side my blogs and web site.. So yes I am aware this is happening.
Best Regards,
Scott Salisbury
[email protected]
The fact that twitter links were ranking from day one, and the fact that Matt Cutts mentioned almost a year ago said that they're treating it as relative to other links was enough for me. The whole not following other users back for PR though is really lame. A common tactic I've seen by spammers and some predominant SEO's is adding tons of people then unfollowing 97% of them. This gives both a psychological and PR sculpting effect.
Tactics to artificially boost one's reach or authority will only be useful/successful if they don't abuse that power. I suspect the follower/friend count drops rapidly once an account starts tweeting/sharing junk links (and Google/Bing probably won't give them much weight unless they also have high engagement metrics - clicks/retweets/shares/likes). It'll be like back in the days of social voting sites - getting on Digg was only half the battle; then you had to convince some significant percent of those clicks to turn into links on blogs, news sites, forums, etc.
I suspect a Twitter algorithm will come into play similar to Klout pertinent to hashtags and monetized with relevant meta-data ads much like Google/Facebook have done for keywords rather than just the trending topics. There's simply too many spammers on Twitter right now. Ultimately Twitter will have to become accountable to shareholders and visitors or a replacement site will come along to crush it. They need to make some money from that traffic at some point. If they don't act they may go the way of Myspace with a replacement site that applies what they failed to do. I've not seen Google Me but with the kind of investing they've done it should be decent.
It's hard to see where Facebook is going because they change their layout every day. In any case, Mark Zuckerberg knows the significance of making money from the site and aims to build relevant search results. The 'Like' feature is certainly going to have a significant impact on their web presence unless Google decides to change their algorithm to devalue Like inbound links (doubtful since it's UGC). Since Facebook's partnering up with Bing I have definitely seen increased hostility against them from Google (vice versa). I've not heard of anyone creating bots for the 'Like' feature yet so they should be alright.
Marketplace on Facebook could make a lot more money by allowing businesses to have stores and XML product feeds similar to Google's product feed. I'd imagine store comparison, and groupon like features will play into this. They could then double up again and advertise the Facebook stores with relevant ads on users pages. Facebook Marketplace Ads for relevant data would likely have a high conversion rate. If they wanted to again triple that revenue they could provide a Facebook payment gateway much like Google has done. Google about half way there and Facebook is about a quarter way there. It's inevitable that one if not both will go this route.
The weight of pages as Matt said is relative the traditional ranking which definitely has to do with the quality of outbound links. I wish Twitter buried spammers them so Google didn't have to sort out the cruft so much. I've asked Google Research Team and the Google Webspam team to come out with an API similar to Askimet which would help sites remove the spammers. Shared spam data between gmail, hotmail, mail.ru and yahoo into an API sure would go a long way in reducing spam data out there. Having data is only so good as those who apply it effectively.
To me, the most exciting part about this is the potential to reduce webspam and return to a more purely editorial model. While people often link to, read and enjoy sources that link out manipulatively, very few of us will be likely to follow a Twitter account, friend someone on Facebook, or "like" something in a social site that's inauthentic, manipulative or spammy. The social graph isn't necessarily cleaner, but the complexity of spam is far lower.
My follow up thought is: while this sounds great. And social ranking may one day play a great deal in ranking/SEO, but what about queries that don't lead themselves to social?
It's not likely the best urologist has a bunch of tweets/retweets/likes. And if they DID have likes, I'd be weary. :-P
My point is, how do SEs differentiate between when a query is more apt to the social graph, than the link graph. And vice versa.
Which goes back to my previous comment: I think that while Social my be an indicator for ranking, I would be it plays such a small part in comparison to the link graph, and will for quite some time.
hehehe... the urologist example is quite good.
But I use another example that can be used in the opposite way: funerary business.
At first you think it is not surely one thing someone would love to like or tweet about and with links, but try to simply think out of the box and you will see that one of greatest series was about a family working in the funerary business (Six Feet Under).
If you don't focus only in the strict commercial terms of your "business", with Social you can have really fun promoting the unpromotable.
"But I use another example that can be used in the opposite way: funerary business.
At first you think it is not surely one thing someone would love to like or tweet about and with links, but try to simply think out of the box..."
Hee hee, funerary business...thinking out of the box!!!
thanks gfiorelli1, you just made my day
AH! Didn't realize the double sense when writing :D
You missed a trick there, you could have said you intended it all along - we would never have known!
Social has a huge impoact on SEO, if you think it does not you really need to wake up to the game.
I have built 100s of Facebook properties, many twitter profiles, all over social bookmaking and many social networking sites I have seen strong results from integrating both Social Media and SEO.
This makes so much sense. People are going away from traditional blogging and persona websites so they are linking less but that doesn't mean there are sites and content that they don't like.
One word .. Awesome!
Win-Win for Facebook & Twitter I think.
Did this come from Wikileaks?
We knew this for some time.
Wow, this kinda sucks. I could see this opening a whole can of worms with buying Tweets from people with authority. Giiz, I'll probably kick myself for not starting a business for people to do that now.
I suspect that unless those paid tweets generate retweets and clicks and follows the way a normal tweet does, it's likely not to count for much (if anything), and accounts that send out low quality paid tweets will likely lose followers and friends plenty fast, too.
Yea, you make a good point, Rand. But I still feel like I'll wake up tomorrow with 10 offers from some SEO company in India offering to create 5,000 Twitter accounts to follow me for the low, low price of $50.
It just seems like any time something like this comes out, there is a new market for people to manipulate it. The (SEO) world would be a better place if everyone would just create good, worthwhile content. But since they don't, there are always people trying to find the shortcuts.
On a side note, I assume this value that is passed is pure generic authority Tweet Juice, since there is no anchor text in one of these posts that would help the link rank for targeted keywords as most of these links are conveyed by a URL shortener, etc. Correct? There is no optimization to it, really. Just getting more 'Juice', like an inbound link from a .edu site or something, to build authority.
Thanks,Joe
I think the problem for Google is many celebs with sponsored tweets are not going to lose their following by sending out the odd add. They'll still remain authoritative. Perhaps they will use keywords like "sponsored" or "ad" to identify which are paid vs. "organic" messages.
Keywords in URL at Facebook fans page are important? Good post
guess so
I stopped using URL shorteners over a year ago. Obviously I see the plus side of a short URL in a post that's only got 140 characters available, but from an SEO standpoint who wants a link that's a "secret" code when you can have a keyword or two.
I figured that this was coming. Keep us informed!
Great post. A great addition to your presentation this morning at SMBSeattle.
You mentioned this morning that some URL shortening services make it difficult for search engines to find the content. What do you recommend we do with our social profiles/content to make them more "Search Friendly"?
Thanks!
Very interesting thing, I'm glad that now we know. Like aeavery4, I'd like to know how to make your social content more search friendly.
I am also concerned about it. As most of the links posted on Twitter are shortened, how is Google going to analyze and take count of the twitter influence?
I use a Firefox extension called Interclue that can see the link origin, so I would imagine tha Google (and maybe Bing) can see this too.
I bet that in few days we will see new super-duper software that will setup a network of twitter and facebook accounts that will be promotion each other. With existing automatic software for mass follow/unfollow it's became a great field for spammers work. Twitter, beware! :)
There are already apps out there which help setup organic networks (of real people) and automate the process of tweeting each others content all over the place.
The important point above is most of these accounts are easy to spot as they simply retweet content and don't acquire any real followers (just accounts that follow users based on keywords found).
Very interesting and welcome news.... and further indications that "no-follow" really means "maybe-follow"... just as I suspected
If you read the interview then you will see that:
"while Bing and Google do have a human signal they can assess from Twitter, supposedly they have no link signal that they can also count. But as it turns out, both of them get what’s called the “firehose” of data from Twitter. This is a constant stream of what people are tweeting.
In that firehose, links do not carry nofollow attributes — so there is some link credit that counts, in some cases"
So no, no-follow is still no-follow.
I have noticed the effects of Twitter at boosting rankings, especially for fresh content. Also I have noticd links from social bookmarking sites (with nofollow) and even Facebook shares seem to have a positive impact.
Anyone else observed something similar?
Very interesting post.
Bing didnt crawl my website https://www.addenda.us , pages are not updated in search result, website is regularly modified
Great post, thanks for the info, nice to see confirmation of suspicions we already held. I would also like to know how Google handles URL shortening links on the web, especially goo.gl links to a URL....does it in any way influence or count towards your SEO efforts? Thanks again... :)
One other thing I don't like about this is that it would skew results based on the actions of a single, yet large, demographic or Twitter and Facebook users.
Given, that is a large and powerful constituency, but there are lots of people, say an over 40 demographic, that still don't do the whole social media thing.
It is great to hear this straight from the hourse's mouth (Google / Yahoo). If they are taking social media profile into account for link juice I wonder if they are doing the same for Reviewer profile as it relates to reviews on the Map/Places listings.
any thoughts?
reaffirms the addage that search engines follow people.
So it IS a big deal. I knew I was doing something wrong ;). Nice article, no better source than straight from the horse’s mouth.
This is such great news since it comes straight from the source. This definitely encourages a more holistic approach to SEO and one that encourages participation in their respective community. I do feel however that the potential to manipulate twitter is far greater than that of facebook so it will be interesting to see what sort of shenanigans people invent.
I have experienced a bit of this, yet while enjoying the results really engines are smart enough to rank those littering the web with multiple Twitter accounts and software driven updates pumping out tweets just for SEO.
Finally, it's official, but a lot of SEOs said from experience that this influences rankings... although i've heared some rumors that bing might want to buy shares in facebook and in this case, google would no longer give value to the links from facebook...
Of course this is great news for the big boys, and can have an enormous impact if used correctly. However, the big question is: If you are NOT an authoritative website, and have limited resources, is it worth doing at all?
I think with these news coming in offically social media is going to play a big role in SEO, as it would be good way to fight webspam as people with higher influencer on this network can be treated as authority sites that are providing powerful backlink which will boost the ranking in the search results
Black hat guys are already on their way to exploit these techniques & I think people wearing white hat will have tough time coping up with them.
The effect of social media on the SERP still remains unclear, also i have been seen some backlinks in webmaster coming from facebook & twitter domain which is being a little weired may be it is so called change or the influence of twitter/facebook on seo
I am somewhat liking this, great information. As with too many clients the talk of a Social Media Campaign is irrelevant to them and not in their mind set due to previous failed or bailed campaigns. Though I hope the degree of Google and Bing's intelligence can handle the large spike in spammers that I foresee with this knowledge being confirmed. Big thanks to Danny Sullivan and Rand for getting this out there....
I feel that the social media will have a huge impact on the seo in the near future. That's the place where the social interaction happens, and Google will try to take most out of it.
For Google, the most important thing is to "Focus on the user and all else will follow". That's why he will integrate the social media in his ranking algorithms.
I must admit as much as this information is great, the majority of us could have guessed exactly what Google and Bing would say. I already reccomended the use of social media especially Twitter for SEO benefits as I know a lot of you guys did.
What concerns me slightly is that now that it is more widely known, are we going to see black hat social media more often? i.e buying tweets, buying accounts (much like buying domains). I hope Google and co already have a penalty system in place for such accounts. Maybe they need a social spam report now too?
I don't know why Google announce these things - as soon as something like this is out in the open, cue the rafts of people trying to game the system. They could have left it quietly running in the background and genuinely high quality sites that earn lots of natural citations would rise to the top (you know, how it's supposed to work).
Now people are going to be looking to take advantage of this at every turn.
cool, something new to game. case study anyone?
Spam 'em :)
Thanks for asking the above questions and sharing the answers.
For my consulting company PricingWire, I use the Twitter username @pricing and here is how our Twitter page ranks for the search term "pricing":
Google = consistently first page and more specifically top 4 to 7 on first page.
Bing = stopped looking after clicking through first 10 pages of results, did not land in first 10 pages
Perhaps Bing began later or by all means simply using different criteria, etc.
Thanks again for the post,
Chris
We started looking at this situation back in the summer and discovered that a lot of self-styled Internet marketing 'gurus' were actually having a negative effect on the amount of news in the world.
We wrote it up in the marketing section of a book that we published, but we didn't quite know what else to do with it at the time - until now!
https://cgwpublishing.blogspot.com/2010/12/cgw-publishing-and-absem-announce-fry.html
This blog post takes much of the relevant content of that section of our book, and gives the man in the street an easy way to assess whether someone really does have authority, regardless of what they're bragging.
I agree with you, nice post.
Jorge Hane
www.jorgehane.com.ar
IF this is true. Which, I have a hard time believing. I have a feeling that the social graph represents such a SMALL ranking impact for most most natural search queries. I'm interested to see if anyone can provide proof of manipulating a ranking for a query using JUST social signals, without any links. I would be willing to bet, it would be tough, if not impossible.
Cool Post ;-/ Even rePosted it (in hebrew)
Socialwebsite must be part of the factors
since simply put.. its what people are talking about.
Nice information.
Facebook and Twitter both websites are World's largest social networks and marketing sources.