Jennifer Dunphy discusses the impact of social signals on search engine results, social media optimization and your business' bottom line.
Jennifer Dunphy discusses the significant value that Google and Bing are giving to the social media signals and their current and future impact on search engine rankings and optimization. Google and Bing confirmed that social signals and the social authority of a user are considered in their algorithm.
Approximately 6% of the overall algorithm ranking elements consist of social signals.
What are social signals? They are your fans, your followers, your friends, your connections & subscribers. And they impact your search results.
Hyper personalization - Likes are the new Links. "Likes have social currency. Think twice about Liking something." What your friend & circle of influence likes on Facebook will now influence your search results, offering a much more personalized search experience. People are far more likely to click through to a site that one or many of their friends has 'liked'. Although the proportion of companies carrying out social media marketing has increased from.
Microsoft research found that 90% of people surveyed seek advice from friends and family before making a decision. And 80% will delay such a decision until their pals give their stamp of approval.
Shares + Tweets = Rankings on Google & Bing
Danny Sullivan (search engine journalist):
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?
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
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.
Author Authority - 2) 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 :-)3) 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.
'The most relevant signal you could have is a recommendation from someone you know,'' Taylor said. 'To know that one of those links is endorsed - it could prevent you from clicking through to a page of spam - it's a really, really meaningful and positive change
Bing social search & real time search are different- Although you have to be logged into FB & Connect it to Bing & it doesn't always show the social results. Enough of your friends have to like or share a subject for it to be relevant in your search .Facebook wants to 'get it right with Bing' before rolling out o Google
So, now you know that the amount of times our tweets are retweeted & the frequency of our comments being shared impacts social search, but did you know that the quality of your connections counts as well?
You got it- The author authority plays a role in social search
Both Google & Bing confirmed that for various search components, they look at the social authority of a user. They 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 use. They actually calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For example; known public figures posts & links will carry more weight than the average Joes post. So a link will carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it.
So essentially the search engines try to 'know' who you are based of your social circles because they don't know who anyone is in real life.
