Will Search Engines Rely More On Social Media To Rank Pages
Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, 18 of July , 2008 at 11:51 pm
As web 2.0 gets stronger and social media starts to dominate - or perhaps I should say - continues to dominate our online lives, will search engines use the information gathered from social media when ranking web pages?
There is a distinct possibility they already are. Whether it through social media or simply social interaction through commenting, search engines need to find new methods to determine the value of web pages. Using links as ‘votes’ has become corrupt over time despite the attempts of Google and others to discount activities such as purchased links.
Linking and keywords will still play a major role in how a search engine ranks a page. However where a visitors comes from, how long they stay on the page and where they go after they leave a page will play a far greater role in the future.
Social media that encourages voting such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn and others will start to play a greater role. To what extent is hard to determine as there will always be a question of reliability and working this media unfairly. However, when you have a voting public, how can they be ignored?
Many will argue that these sites relate more to blogging than traditional web sites, however many traditional businesses with websites are now into blogging as well.
Social media is area of the internet that all businesses with an online presence need to address. Participation in some form, even a simple blog, will ultimately help a business. This is particularly true if search engines such as Google start to include data from these activities in their search algorithms.
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Comment by Chris Lang
Made Tuesday, 22 of July , 2008 at 9:17 am
I can gaurantee you all the pieces are in place in Google. It is already there and going on now. Just take a look at the last few posts on my site.
Google has an algorithm in place to rank your social profiles. It now will soon become worthless to submit your own articles to Digg if your profile is not active and valued by Google.
The only thing that remains is the yearly Google slap down that is going to come and this year it will be abuse of social bookmarking sites.
There is so much social bookmarking spam that I expect the Q3 PageRank update to see many sites get slammed down in the SERPs for this abuse.
Google has a record of punishing sites right before Christmas so expect to see this about October of November 2008.
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