Earlier this week Facebook announced its 'Open Graph' at F8. There was all sorts of hubbub (much of it the bye-product of well-orchestrated buzz) about Facebook finally making strides to kill Google's dominance of the web. So should you hangup your white hat, your black hat, your grey hat, and trade it all in for a blue hat? Much as we love Facebook, the answer, dear reader, is no: SEO is not dead.
Watch this week's video to hear Rand's take on how Facebook's 'Open Graph' will impact web marketing and all the ways it won't. There are all sorts of opportunities that will likely emerge out of this new technology, so you should pay attention. So go ahead and keep an eye out for a nice fitting blue hat in the near future, but don't plan to throw away your white hat anytime soon.
The sticker we received
Agreed and i would also consider the frame of mind of people who are on Google and on Facebook. When i'm on Google basically i'm looking for a solution to a problem, when i'm on facebook i'm not in a problem/solution frame of mind, i'm in an entertaining state of mind. Like buttons could be embedded on 99% of sites but i doubt that someone will like a "hemroids treatment" and share the fact that he has hemroids with his friends. That's why anyone looking for a solution will always make Google the homepage of his browser.
Yes yes... very nice Rand; but where is the damn "Like" button that I can push so other people will be able to find it?
Seriously though... way to bring some sanity to the discussion. It's an augmentation... not a replacement.
forget the "like" button....
.... where the heck can I get a can of that linkjuice rand?
:-D
Lol I don't see it here but if you like to implement it on your blog I wrote a short tutorial here. Good luck! :)
i want to know where the this sucks button is... digg has the bury (im not on digg enough to know exactly what it does) but some things i wish i could ding and say this is stupid... i mean cmon we even got the little thumbs down here... is facebook trying to not hurt people feelings because their posts are lame?
Great video and input Rand!
I must say two things though:
1. You're right when you say that social bookmarking isn't new - but Facebooks "Like" is pretty new to the fact that it's a gigantic social network that already have users. For example, in Sweden over 80% of every living person between 18-30 have Facebook.
The way Facebook then implements the simplistic and easy "like" button will make it easier to share and thus more efficient for Open Graph to gather data. So yeah - I do think that people will "like" brandable cans.
2. I hear a lot of talk about the new Facebook and search marketers saying it won't matter and some are nervous.
But seriously - why should we be nervous? If Facebook develops into a alternative to Google (not directly competitor) and also provides better search funcionality with the new "likes" - who do you think will help the companies with generating traffic?
Yep, it's the SEOs -beacuse who else will you turn to if you need some "White Hat Like Building"?
I like that - ' White Hat Like Building' .
Never ceases to amaze me, and perhaps it is just shock, aw, concern, or pure link baiting, but all the proponents of "this is gonna kill Google," or "this will bring the end to SEO."
Great job cutting through a lot of the hype.
Google, and any search engine's, strength will come from bringing together the strongest aggregation of results.
The quality of information will be the intersection of sources, not the exclusion of them. Search will continue to be a hub for activity, both on and offline, acting as the connecting point to many of these disparate channels.
Thanks Rand for a WBF that try put a "stop and reflect" to all the worries, doubts, questions the Open Graph is causing.
Following your logic, what I can understand is the the Like function and Open Graph can be a powerful tool for Brand Marketing (mostly for a the B2C market and mostly mainstreams products. I agree with Marco).
You know? Somehow all of this remembers me what we aimed to do in Television but - due the limits of that media - we were struggling doing as we couldn't control it. I'll try to explain myself:
for instance, when a new series were going to be broadcasted, we were creating any kind of marketing buzz (promos, teasers, specials, infonews inside the News, infographic as countdowns, marketing mix...) in order to make people talk about that series to all their friends. Somehow as "I like" but in an analogical way. The problem was that being analogical the results weren't really measurable.
But think now... Facebook and its audience... if I was still working in the television field I would use it massively, in order to reach the widest buzz possible and in order to not be just dependent of my series Page on FB and to have it as one of my most important marketing tools in the marketing mix planning.
I would use it in order to reach the FB audience directly from my website and counting on the 'six degrees of separation' philosophy that seems being behind the I like technology.
I see it as a supplementing tool, not a substitute of Google Search and its Link Graph (especially now that Vertical and Rich Snippets are in all the regional versions of Google).
The "I like" could influence the Google Link Graph? Maybe yes, especially if Branding will be have that importance many are saying it will have. But then, we will have to really check out how the "I like" data will be integrated into the link graph and the Google algorithtm (I suggest to read this recent YOUmoz, which is about Google and Twitter, but can be translated somehow to all the Social Media Panorama)
and next time someone says "SEO is dead"... answer: "the SEO is dead, long live the SEO!"
Facebook is great for reaching a particular segment of the market.
I have had a lot of meetings recently about social this and social that and how to best use facebook but it is still very much geared towards a certain demographic.
I was researching some facebook pages and if anyone is doing this for clients or for themselves, check out Paramount Studio's...awesome!
You're right... and confirming my Branding theory.
Seriously dude, no seomoz post is complete without your comment. Today I checked this blog post second time just to read your take on the published post. You are indeed a commenter every blogger would dream to have :)
Thanks brother :)
The fact is that I like intelligent discussions and talks, as they are my best way to learn something.
And SEOmoz it's The Place for that.
I agree, this is a really helpful response to an article which readjusts perspective on this facebook news - helpfully remaining positive on what SEO can do if it works with facebook
I'm swimming in work right now, so I just dropped in for a quick peek, and I couldn't resist commenting on your remark Himanshu.
I couldn't agree with you more. If SEOmoz were a news channel, gfiorelli1 would be like a permanent "talking head" that they invited on daily to comment.
Don't forget to thumb him up whenever you like his comments.
Or to thumb it down if not... but if not... tell me why: I'd like to know the reason.
Hah hah, the only time you get thumbs down is when you talk about people linking :)
Yes totally agree SEO is very much there and will remain as the main purpose of the person who is searching on the search engines is to find what is available locally and globally. For that the seacrh engines have to display results which are relevant and genuine.
The like buttons of the social media merely state the preferances of the people who are connected with eachother and the preferances, likes and dislikes vary from person to person hence that cannot be the metrics to judge or influence the rankings. That can just depict the popularity of the product and inform you about the latest buzz.
But the social graph of twitter as compared to facebook has an edge as twitter adds the voice and opinion of the person or the company in its 140 characters.
The social graph linked with quality search results to inform the searcher about what people are saying about it is the next extention to make the search results more qualitative.
If we compare this to the real time decisions we take, logically we also want to know more about the owner of the company or the company culture before finalizing any deal with a company.
But SEO cannot die it will only evlove. As SEO is like adding energy to the website and energy cannot be destroyed it gets transformed from one form to another.
twitter.com/webprotech
I see the Open Graph as more a supplemental, secondary filter in the search process.
I would only go to Facebook first to find things that I want recommendations on. Searching the web for information is different than looking for a recommendation. I think that is the fundamental difference in these two processes.
Sometimes I want a recommendation, and sometimes I want the data to make my own analysis. It pretty much depends on the decision at hand.
Great post!
Love Whiteboard Fridays! Thanks for the rundown on this, I didn't quite understand Facebook's open graph.
At the same time, I agree Google won't be replaced, and don't think they will for many decades at least. Google's business model is making technology usable for people, and they spend incredible resources to do so.
The second Facebook allows searching their database of likes, that will become my engine of choice. Give it a year or two and we will all be checking to see which custom can branding company was liked the most by 400,000,000 people using Facebook, not hoping Google's semi-retarded robot will provide good guesses at what's relevant. The bell tolls LOUDLY for traditional search engines, and SEO companies. Don't expect seomoz to toll the bell on its own demise.
Totally Agree with ideas of this wbf. To me facebook social graph won't compete with google link graph
I definitely agree with all points you've shared here Rand!
Been in lots of discussions (internally, in my place of work) about the universal like button replacing search, and to strip it down further, it all boils down to basic behavioral psychology, "I like my friends not because we're all the same (probably similar to some extent), but because we share something in common."
In addition, do you have friends who've actually pointed out that they want personalized search to slow down with reco's a little bit?
I think both points work in a similar fashion, yes we want suggestions and second opinions, but at the end of the day, we still want to make our own decisions.
Cheers!
I would like to hear the negative side of the new FB functionality... who will lose here? For example, if you try to think evil then how can Yelp's decision to send its data to FB turn around and bite Yelp?
I would love to hear some devil's advocate arguments here... so, let hear them!
Thanks,
Mike
gfiorell1 hit on the big picture here. I do agree with Rand's points but where this will be big is as a product review. If you have a b2C site what better way than to place this on your product pages. I am getting reading to implement this on several client sites over the next few weeks and I am looking forward to the results. Look at all the data showing more people are more likely to agree with a personal recommendation then one from a non-personal one. So if I go to a site and find a great price on say clothes or sporting goods and I mark the like it on the FB link and my friends see that. That is free extended advertising that site gets and the conversion rate opportunity I would think would be higher. Again hope to give you some factual data in the coming weeks.
SEO is certainly not dead but any marketer worth their salt better be looking at FEO now too (Facebook Engine Optimization). Look at the stats on the power of Facebook in this blog post from the web conversion folks over at SeeWhy: : https://seewhy.com/blog/2010/06/10/10-eye-popping-facts-about-facebook/)
"Fact #6 - Facebook delivers 2x the upstream traffic to news and media sites than Google." That on top of the fact that Facebook has more page views than Google and people spend dramatically more time on it every month than Google should make everyone realize that Zuck is now taking the reigns over the Internet.
Facebook's use of Open Graph tags is a fantastic thing. I also wrote a short tutorial on using open graph tags to display your own custom video player in wall streams – If you're interested, have a look here: https://ahrengot.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/how-to-display-your-custom-flash-video-player-on-facebook/.
In my example i use HTML5 fallback so the video will not only play on your desktop computer, but on iPhone's and iPad's - Even from inside the native facebook iPhone app. Now that's pretty damn cool!
well well well, I think you are making a great mistake by considering open graph as a analytics tool., its just a protocol , just a method of defining some objects., and the link graph is the pretty different thing it is being used to monitor record and analyse the no of visits ., you should compare open graph with meta tags og:title vs meta name="title" and so on,,,but using open graph gives us more chances to describe the content and elements of content ., like image, image height,width etc so its better to use it instead of regular meta tags, and even google's websites are using it now, try viewing source of any youtube page .
Now the point comes at total number social shares,likes & comments and I thinks google is taking these things also into consideration as total number of visits.
Old but good. Man has Whiteboard Friday come a long way!
I think voting buttons have a lot of weaknesses compared to links. Voting buttons can be abused if you hire a ton of people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to vote for you. A good piece of content can not receive votes unless it has the button installed. Voters may not be representative of the average user, like Digg which is highly skewed by younger techie crowd.
A very good post Rand, and one that is not caught up in all the overexcitement of Facebook's annoucement. The 'like' buttons will be a good addition to generate traffic to sites, but it falls way short of Google as it currently stands.
I totally agree that Facebook's like feature is not a threat to Google search. I think it will be a good way for people to get recommendations of good content from their friends, but I already use Delicious and Twitter for this. It will still be fascinating to see how this develops and I look forward to SEOMoz uncovering the best ways that SEOs can utilize this new tool.
Transaction that is information based: Google Search Engine:
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Transaction that is peer based, or fashin based: Facebook OG SearchEngine:
buy cool shoes
Facebook will know what you like and what everyone you like likes. It's a marketer's dream and will be a user's dream.
Google buzz was definitely a signal that there is value to social bookmarking. You have to respect Google's inteliigence and market research.
Very interesting thought of a Facebook browser...
There is nothing white hat about an SEO utilizing this new system (or social media) at all. Fads, hype, buzzwords, "trends"...these all fade away and this is the embodiment of all those things.
Google has given us their mission statement: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Why don't we act like ethical, white hat SEOs and actually OPTIMIZE (e.g. help Google meet this goal) instead of trying to clutter the internet with dentists who have 100k social network friends, 3mil "likes" and absolutely no useful information to add to the index.
It's no wonder the search engines treat us like criminals.
Is it just my connection or is the video not loading for others?
video doesn't load properly here also. But may be i have slow broad band connection. so i first start the video and then pause it for a while and then play it back. Then it works fine.
It is working now.
OK after watching the video and getting some good infomaton and I can think about is how to get one of those Facebook "like" stickers! I WANT ONE!
SEOmoz link juice cans?!?!?! And what is the alcohol content? TGIWF! (Thank God It's Whiteboard Friday!) Funniest SEO thing I've heard in some days and a *great* branding idea, IMHO.
Thanks for reminding me I need to log into Facebook once in a while just to see all that new stuff. So many missed opportunities.
Rand, I am really curious about your most current thinking on the social graph's impact. I am reminded of this Whiteboard Frienday from last February where you are basically saying that there's a significant paradigm shift (not your term, granted) going on in Google search as a result of integrating data from the social networks. Real time search is a specific and obvious part of this, but you also discuss the impact of the social graph per se and mention Facebook. "I think you are going to see a huge impact that the social graph has particularly on viral kinds of content, on fresh kinds of content, and on sharable kinds of content," meaning the Google search results. It's a claim that I think has resonated very widely throughout the SEO world. Some people are even saying that social media marketing will replace traditional SEO (not a conclusion that you intended, I am sure).
I have been thinking about this a lot since I watched that video and wondering what kinds of evidence there are to support the claim that the social graph is having a significant impact on the rankings (even of particular kinds of content). How do we verify it? Can you help me there? Are your views about this evolving? This is an important topic that we need to stay in touch with, and I hope SEOmoz will keep returning to it.
Hi philip,
I think Rand said some 5% impact of social graph on organic rankings in his video (i dont remember which one) and he also talked about mechanical turks and why social graph can't replace link graph on several occassions.
I don't think the day FB will takeover Google has come...
It's important to remember the "Power of Habits".
People are used to search things such as "SEOmoz link juice cans" (Plug to Rand's example) on Google. Even if we TELL them that now they need to do their everyday searches on FaceBook, I don't think it would have such an impact...
Don't underestimate the power of habits. There are always people that are reluctant to changes... I know: I'm one of them.
Imho, it's a storm in a teacup! Don't get me wrong: It's a nice feature Facebook has developed, but to say it'll revolutionize the way we search...? Come on!
Just think about this: How many people in your personal friends are SEO gurus (SEOmoz IS an exception, it's obvious, since they're all friends and working for a company which is doing, like, stuff that is related to SEO)? In my case, everytime someone that is close to me asks what is my job, it takes me 30 mins to explain him what SEO is all about! In this case, if I'm looking for information that is related to SEO, will I search FB for it, knowing that my friends don't even know what it is?
It's a simple summary of what Rand explained... But think about it! And overcome your fears... ;)
--In my case, everytime someone that is close to me asks what is my job, it takes me 30 mins to explain him what SEO is all about!--
I have given up trying to lol!
"Nan, i work in computers"
Yeah it always ends up like this... :)
C'mon Rand and the team...I wanna press "like" on seomoz! Where's the button :) The last bit you mentioned really caught me, with MS and FB...You talked about how 'almost' perfect Google was and that is why Bing was struggling - could Bing now have a way to try something new. It would be very interesting to see that if I visited Bing, logged in using FB connect or something, when I made a search, there was a section there "Your Friends Like these Pages"
To connect the web through social connections and not website links could potentially be huge. I agree that link-graph is not dead, but in the same way Google made real time search work, someone could make 'social' search work too.
And dangerous too... what about searches I don't want to show to friends.
Remember, people is not so aware about privacy. And the FB privacy system is not really the best one. But being this is different topic than the one we are talking about right here, I cut it here :)
but the results would only show pages that my connections have Liked...if I didnt want to share a page, I wouldnt Like it...
The potential for this to run alongside standard search results could be really interesting, and i would love to see it!
MMM... yes, you're right.
people still use fb?
hehehe... yes, in Europe is so much more used than Twitter...
... and to do a marketing reasearch about the use of FB and Twitter in Europe could be useful for Google. How much the Tweets (mainly from the USA?) are going to influence the SERPs of the European Googles?
In Europe Facebook is huge, and especially in the Scandinavia where over 40% of the population (incl. the newly born son and 97 year old grandma) have Facebook.
In comparison Twitter is really, really small. I've researched it a bit and in Sweden approx 3,65M have Facebook (40% of population) - and only 100 000 have Twitter.
That's a big difference.
Facebook is big just about everywhere (other than China, where it's blocked). If you're interested in developed markets, or even developing markets, it's probably either 1st or 2nd in the social network tables. And just globally, it's one of the 4 or 5 biggest sites on the web.
Obviously it's not right for every brand or company, but if it's mass audiences you're looking for, FB's the one you want.
Ha ha very funny firegolem!
Hopefully the Seomoz drink comes in orange (strangely addictive) flavor!
So... an Indiana news station was reporting on Facebooks destruction of Google this morning (I think they read the Mashable article and multiplied it by 10), and the reporters clearly had no idea what they were talking about!
They were saying something along the lines of ~"Google ranks pages on two factors, how many times your search words appear in the page and how many links are directed to your site. Now that Facebook has taken away half of the formula what will Google do?"
Oof...
I basically just look as the 'like' button essentially being the same thing as all of the other 'share' buttons. If someone was going to link to your page, the like/share/tweet button isn't going to stop them.
The Like button is interesting for sharing and branding in a social circle and may or may not drive relevant traffic to your site. I am assuming it would due to the fact that people are hopefully "likeing" a site that there friends and family on FB may be interested in... But at this time it has zero effect on any of the search engine algorithm's and until it does I will be hesitant to try it.
As with all marketing perhaps we will do some test and try it and see if there are any possible measurable results.
My concern is that we could be losing retweets or add this type links like del.ico.us and so on that DO benefit SEO to get a "Like" that does not (at this time).
When Rand puts it on SEOmoz, thats the day I will do the same :)
Great WBF!
first i thought it was funny because nobody liked the page with the little button but using super awesome SEO Site Tools its been like 6 times but it was actually the link was never written to the page https://twitpic.com/1jr2oj then Facebook told me i liked the error (see pic)
Even if Google's link graph is still valuable, Facebook Open Graph opportunities are huge: user specific (not generic), very widespread (400M users, and growing) also on common users (not just webmasters and SEOs) and apparently more difficult to trick than PageRank.
We could study "Like building" strategies in the near future.
I think google still way ahead of any one else out in the net.
This discussion reminds me of my collage days (long ago) when the talk was about how the need for computer programmers was going away -- It did not go away -- It changed and evolved.
I'd like to put in an order for five buckets of link juice please. What? You only have cans? Alright, give me everything you've got.
Excellent post Rand. I couldn't agree more.
I'll be sure to refer the marketing dept to this video before they throw all of their eggs in that basket. Which unfortunately for most of us, is probably coming.
Thanks for valueable information regarding facebook my hands up for facebook . Otherday I signup for facebook add account and they have not charge me single cent for activiting my add account where as google charge $10 to activiate your add which I think it bazar and ripe off from google side but we have to admit the factor google is still king
-Casey Removed Link