SEO Effects of Social Search

Yesterday we covered the hot topic of Google’s social search from a very ‘news’ perspective. If you haven’t watched the tour video take a minute and hit play on the video below.

The truth is that Google is rolling this new search functionality piecemeal just in the same way as most of the recent features. So if I try to explore the option from my work account I get no offers and I’d have to cheat to go play with it right now.

However, on my personal account the option comes right up and my personal account has a smaller social circle than my work account so it seems to me that it’s just a work-in-progress at the moment.

A visit to the Google Inside Search site gives us a bit more confirmation:

If you aren’t seeing the features of Search plus Your World, don’t worry, we’re rolling them out over the next few days.

.. so if you’re not getting the option to try it out, it should come along soon!

Here’s a ‘hands on’ example of ‘Search plus Your World’ for a phrase I personally talk about a lot, ‘minecraft’:

The first thing that occurs to me is that Danny talks about Minecraft WAY more than anyone else, but the second thing that gets my interest is that there’s nothing in the results that I wouldn’t have read or couldn’t get from poking my head into Google+.

Going back to that video from Google that we linked earlier, I have to admit this looks like a very over-hyped feature where 90% of the interesting parts of the video aren’t things we can do with the new search feature. This almost feels like a Microsoft product that was invented by marketers as something to market with zero user interest?

Well that’s my opinion dealt with, but what about SEO factors of this new feature?

A ton of questions come to mind that need to be answered, here’s a few :

• Who stands to gain from these types of searches?
• What sites will be negatively impacted?
• What should websites be doing to take advantage of this new feature?

The first one’s easy, Google, and particularly, Google+ will gain the most from this new search behaviour. Google has always wanted you to find what you want within their domain/services, and limiting your search to a Google owned property, selling it as a great feature, works so well for Google’s overall goals. If you don’t believe that Google wants to keep you inside their services, as you use Google products challenge yourself to consider ‘What more could Google do to keep me inside their networks?’ and I think you’ll start seeing all the efforts they are making to give you what you want instantly vs. leaving Google to visit an external site.

Social media sites that were getting a lot of commercial traffic/advertising will be the hardest hit by this move. If a client came to me and said “We’re on all the big sites, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Squidoo, etc.. but we haven’t bothered with Google+.” I would be forced to assume they were Australian with such an opposite approach. The same thing would follow with campaign strategies where a company looking at time spent vs. returns would be silly to start a social media campaign anywhere but on Google+ first.

If you have a website that isn’t already following the guidelines for linking between Google+ and your site, you need to start there and then work on building up followers. Ideally you want people talking about your products/services more than your competition so I’d strongly urge someone within your company to engage in Google+ social media efforts on a weekly basis if not more. While it’s pointless to have infinite reach and zero relevance, you also want to be very ‘friendly’ doing whatever it takes to get people to take enough interest in your company pages to follow, +1, add to circles, etc..

In fact the last bit of advice will be a recurring theme for early 2012 where we will be looking at super organic ways to get your product/services out to relevant sections of the internet.

A good example would be a product that is easy to find on-line, but very technical/tricky to work with. Selling the product puts you in the same group as everyone else selling that product, but offering expertise on that product will raise your profile quickly while generating interest/informing potential clients. If you can get links from grateful recipients the effort will pay for itself, and the people you come in contact with are very likely to draw in more clients due to the way that social media is sharing business leads via friend connections.

Typical of Spring, the sooner you plant this ‘social seed’ the sooner it will grow into something that can support your on-line efforts.

Speaking of growing, Chia Bart is getting a little leafy already!

Bart’s beans are sprouting!

Getting Intimate with Google Personal Search

In a further effort to make search results more relevant to it users, Google will begin to provide more personalized search results for users of the fledgling Google+ social networking service. The new service will draw search results by drawing on the photos, news and comments posted from within the Google+ network and should be rolled out in the next few days.

A new service called "Search, Plus Your World" will display users own content from Google+, along with posts from friends, said Amit Singhal, who focuses on improving information retrieval at Mountain View, California-based Google. If someone searched for a dog, for instance, pictures of friends’ dogs might show up first in their search results.

"At Google, we always want to return the most comprehensive and relevant answers to your questions, and many times those answers are in the open public Web, but many times those answers are in your own personal content," Singhal said. "This is the first time we’re bringing personal content right into the results page."

Other changes to the Google search include a new feature called “Profiles in Search” which will include an auto complete function that will display links to your friends (from Google+) accounts while typing in queries in to the search box on Google. The new service will also offer suggestions of people to follow. This information will be drawn from Google+ accounts or from Google’s photo-sharing service, Picasa.

Despite its best efforts, Google still struggles to compete with the social media giant Facebook. As of October 2010, Google had 40 million users, compared to the 800 million Facebook users.

Which Social Sites Should I Use? Part 2: Breakdown of the “Big 5″

Continued from Part 1 of “Which Social Sites Should I Use?“:

Once you have established a strong following across these main five sites, you can consider participating in a few niche social sites based upon your industry, services or geographical location. The social properties you employ define your overall social persona. Subsidiary aspects of social media can be realized in terms of company branding, building company legitimacy and trust, and online reputation management.

Breakdown of "The Big 5"

Facebook

Traditionally, Facebook was typically best for personal relationships and getting reacquainted with friends and acquaintances. You can also use it for work colleagues with whom you have personal relationships.

With the advent of Facebook Pages, businesses can now separate their personal and business faces into different "pages" You can think of this as a Yellow Pages advert promoting your business. It gives your viewers a chance to see some of your products and get to know a little about your company and their online social presence.

You can build Groups and add Events to further engage your followers. The success of a Page is based upon the number of "Likes" from visitors it receives. It is important to have a strong and reputable personal profile that will be connected to the Business Page to act as an administrator.

Facebook is best for "private networks" but is useful to generate an online business presence

LinkedIn

This is the most popular site for maintaining your professional business networks. You can search and connect with former work colleagues, business partners and network with people that you may not know but may be in a related industry.

Different sections of the site allow for employee recruitment in order to facilitate the hiring of your next employee. This is a particularly great feature as people in your business network may be able to personally recommend an individual in your industry. You can list current promotions and have colleagues or clients recommend you which helps to build a more credible profile.

LinkedIn is your "professional network"

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform as it only allows for posts (or tweets”) limited to 140 characters. Although Twitter is not a website in the sense that Facebook or LinkedIn is, it is starting to adopt similar functionality. Recent additions of pictures, follower suggestions and groups seem to indicate that Twitter may be moving toward more of a destination site, rather than only a platform.

Twitter allows you to connect with a much broader group of people. Because you can follow someone that does not necessarily follow you back, connections can be one-way or two-way and allow you to broadcast status updates, links, etc without needing to have an involved conversation. However, those businesses that do pro-actively engage their followers find that Twitter is an effective medium for connecting with a large number of people and organizations without the formality of a "friend request".

Twitter is for your "public network"

Google+

Google+ is considered the company’s fourth foray into social networking. The New York Times have declared it as Google’s biggest attempt to rival the social network of Facebook, which had over 800 million users in 2011.

Google+ integrates social platforms such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz and introduces new services called Circles, Hangouts and Sparks. Google+ is currently available as a web site and is reported to be available soon as a desktop application. It is already available as a mobile application.

Google+ is best for advertising your business, as well as for public and private interactions

YouTube

Created by three former members of PayPal and launched in 2005, YouTube offers a site for users to upload, view and share videos. Traditionally, YouTube did not seem to be advantageous to online business promotion and was considered a personal social site. Increasingly the video platform has become a standard medium for the promotion a business. By creating a YouTube account, users are able to create a public "channel" where owners can upload video files showcasing products and offer promotional information.

Remember that the larger your social network, the more time that will be involved to maintain it. Stick with the main 5 (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+) and choose only a few from the specialty niche oriented social groups. It is always best not to spread yourself too thin. It is better to have a closely formed network with a good number of quality followers than it is to have a larger network spread over many social sites that you are not engaged with.

You need to link accounts together to increase their effectiveness. Linking can become a bit complicated if you are dealing with many social sites. You may want to create a text document that shows where your feeds are being syndicated to (see example).

YouTube is akin to a "television audience"

In Part 3, we will discuss Linking Your Social Accounts

Top Nine Ways to Enrich Your Business Blog in 2012

Beanstalk’s Heather Jennings published an very helpful article today on the Beanstalk site offering tips on how to best utilize your business blog in 2012.  From whitepapers to eBook creation … video to just plain posting – Heather outlines some simple and actionable items to help stay directed to making the most of your online presence.  It would seem silly to outline the full article here when it’s an easy 5 minute read on site that’s worth every minute (note: I *may* be biased).

Her full article is Top Nine Ways to Enrich Your Business Blog in 2012.  And when you’re done reading that … get back to enjoying your weekend !!!

Spain-full SOPA Politics

The Jan 2nd news that Spain has full implemented it’s anti-piracy ‘Sinde Law’ was a blow to the Anti-SOPA community. It was even more painful to learn today that there’s deep allegations of US involvement and threats geared towards passing the law.

If you’ve been on Reddit, or Torrentfreak, you’ve probably seen the following allegations:

In a leaked letter sent to Spain’s outgoing President, the US ambassador to the country warned that as punishment for not passing a SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking law, Spain risked being put on a United States trade blacklist . Inclusion would have left Spain open to a range of “retaliatory options” but already the US was working with the incoming government to reach its goals.

United States government interference in Spain’s intellectual property laws had long been suspected, but it was revelations from Wikileaks that finally confirmed the depth of its involvement.

More than 100 leaked cables showed that the US had helped draft new Spanish copyright legislation and had heavily influenced the decisions of both the government and opposition.

Okay, so then if we hop over to WikiLeaks (the same uber-political anti-American site that’s been caught multiple times sharing carefully doctored misinformation) this should be all over the front page right? Nope. Nothing posted to WikiLeaks since December 16th 2011. Apparently the only thing the Wikileaks folks are excited about is getting more donations to ‘fight the evil US’.

So if we look around we should be able to find the leaked cables right? Nope. (Please correct me here if I’m wrong.)

What’s more there’s conjecture that the ‘supposed’ US involvement was a ploy to put the blame for the bill on the US when the Spanish government had long term goals to put the bill into effect. Apparently the furore over further meddling by the US in Spanish politics might distract the majority of the voting public and save the current political parties from losing support over pushing through the bill?

Talk about confusing! I have a headache just thinking about all these people standing in a loose circle pointing at each other saying ‘blame them!’.

It will be interesting to see how this news unfolds and if the US administration will dispute the claims or just lump it since the Spanish anti-piracy bill clearly falls in-line with current direction of the US policy makers?

On a slightly different topic of heads, Chia Bart has sprouted:

Sorta gross isn’t it?

It was a moisture issue, I had to put a bag over his head for the whole night to get the sprouting to happen. Now it should just need some light and regular water top-ups to get the green to start showing.

SOPA Sabotage

From the same band that brought us “Fight for Your Right” comes many great themes for opposing SOPA.

In a post-SOPA world images and music with questionable copyrights will be tickets for take downs, financial seizure, and other under handed attacks on popular websites.

You think the legal ho-ha over patents is extremely petty and wasteful? Picture how bad the internet will be when user posted content can get your entire organization shut down instantly?

Here’s an example, say I decide to post something on our blog that’s not SOPA-safe. The competition takes note of it, and the instant I say something the competition doesn’t like, they complain about the post, our DNS is yanked, our accounts are frozen, and THEN we get the complaint to remove the content.

Yeah that’s not going to work, look at Germany if you want to see an example of what a SOPA-like environment is like.

Here’s a SOPA-like example:
Retired, Computerless Woman, forced by courts to pay fine for pirating hooligan movie

Even little things, like a picture of an awesome band, and a ~10 sec clip of their music would become ‘frightening’ if SOPA passed. Such uses are fine right now as we’d find out right away if a rights holder cares, and we’d take it down without a fuss. Post SOPA would be completely different, and fear of take-downs would absolutely kill user-submissions because each post would need to be checked for violations.

Tom’s Hardware also posted today with similar concerns to what we have in regards to immoral and unwarranted take-downs of sites over user-generated content. I really do like the fact that they had no qualms explaining exactly how pirates will work around SOPA DNS blocks, how SOPA won’t be effective at it’s main purpose, and is only going to be abused.

The names of companies opposed to SOPA is huge and growing, with supporters like GoDaddy changing it’s stance as the public backlash forces them to step back from a supporting role. In fact today GoDaddy even took the time to share a copy of the remaining supports of the bill, with it’s name missing from the list.

This has even more people freaking out about GoDaddy because:

It’s no wonder GoDaddy reacted to the anti-SOPA movement; One report had pegged the losses for GoDaddy at over 70,000 domains in a single day last week, and today (Dec 29th) is the official ‘boycott GoDaddy’ day over on Reddit.

Imgur also stepped up and announced that they are working on leaving GoDaddy as well, but there’s speculation over how people would react if GoDaddy was to ‘make good’ on it’s position by actually supporting the anti-SOPA movement instead of merely dropping it’s support for the bill.

Only time will tell but I really am starting to worry about all the folks saying that SOPA is ‘likely’ to pass!? That just seems so absurd to me, but experts are hard to ignore, and I’m no political watch dog.

UPDATE: Okay I knew I was breaking the cardinal rule of auto-play and I knew it was for a good cause, but I couldn’t let it stick for more than a day. The clip’s still there you just have to hit play.

Happy Holidays From Beanstalk *

We at Beanstalk would like to thank all our clients, blog and article readers and supporters for another fantastic year.  As we head into the holidays, it’s a fantastic time to reflect back on the past year and be grateful for being part of a wonderful community and for the clients that have allowed us to continue to do the work we love, for people we love to do it for.  We wish you and yours all the very best this holiday season and hopes for a very prosperous new year.

For all our clients and those wishing to contact us, we will have special hours of operation over the holidays.  They are:

December 22nd – closing at 1PM for our staff Christmas party
December 23rd – closed
December 24th – closed
December 25th – closed
December 26th – closed
December 27th – open and ready to serve you

If you are a client and there is an urgent need to contact us over the holidays the email emergency (at) beanstalk-inc.com is where to direct your emails to insure they don’t get mixed in with others.  This email will be checked periodically over the break however during this time an emergency will be defined as a crucial event such as a site being down or other major issue.  Unfortunately we won’t be able to respond to all casual questions.  We’ll all be spending time with our families and loved ones and hope you are too.

So once again … from all of us at Beanstalk to all of you: Happy Holidays.  Now stop surfing the web and get to the festivities.

Special Thanks:  To Gemini Computers and Jim Boykin and his Internet Marketing Ninjas for the kind thoughts and appreciated holiday gifts.

Webcology Year In Review

For those interested in what some of the top minds of SEO, SEM, Mobile Marketing and Social Media have to say about 2011 and maybe more importantly – what they see coming in 2012 then Thursday’s Webcology is a must listen.  Hosted on WebmasterRadio.fm, Jim Hedger and I will be hosting 2 separate round-tables with 5 guests each over 2 hours covering everything from Panda to personalization; mobile growth to patent applications.  It’s going to be a fast-paced show with something for everyone.

The show will be airing live from 2PM EST until 4PM EST on Thursday December 22nd.  If you catch it live you’ll have a chance to join the chat room and ask questions of your own but if you miss it you still have an opportunity to download the podcast a couple days later.  I don’t often focus this blog on promoting the radio show I co-host but with the lineup we have including SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin, Search Engine Watch’s Jonathan Allen and Mike Grehan, search engine patent guru Bill Slawski and many more talented and entertaining Internet Marketing experts it’s definitely worth letting our valued blog visitors know about it. And if you’re worried it might just be a quiet discussion, Terry Van Horne is joining us to insure that doesn’t happen.  Perhaps I’ll ask him a question or two about his feelings about Schema.org (if you listen to the show … you’ll quickly get why this is funny).

So tune in tomorrow at 2PM EST at http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/webcology/, be sure to join the chat room to let us know your thoughts and enjoy.

Panda’s take on Popular vs. Productive

I’ve seen a few SEO blog posts recently on post-panda content concerns that unsurprisingly contradict each other.

The “popular” camp seem to feel the following is true:

- Don’t post anything off topic
- Don’t post anything that won’t be a hit
- If you post something that fails, pull it
- If you can’t pull a post, fake the popularity

So what that means is pulling your punches until you have a post that’s really going to draw attention to your blog.
The SEO logic is that while regular content creates a positive metric, anyone can produce regular content and in fact loads of unpopular content could become a negative ranking factor.

The “productive” camp follow these golden rules:

- Don’t post content that isn’t unique
- Don’t spin content to create unique content
- Keep keyword densities high
- Keep a low ratio of links in proportion to images/text

This group spend all their time creating content and don’t spend time worried about how popular every post will be.

The SEO logic with “producers” is that the Panda update wants to see regular fresh content publications without duplication of existing content, only ‘really bad’ content can harm this ranking factor.

Well I hate to be a pacifist, but both sides are correct! A great strategy would be to listen to BOTH sides.

• If every post on your blog gets 300+ links on the day it’s posted, that’s not going to look organic
• If your blog gets one post, every single day, and nobody links to them, that’s not organic either

So post regularly, but don’t sweat it if you miss one day. If you are having a slow day for topics, you should try to go find some discussions where you can generate interest/back-links to your existing posts. At worst you’ll find some topics that are far more interesting that what you’ve been blogging about and you’ll get something fresh to discuss.

A post in draft, waiting for perfection, won’t do you much good if it never gets published.

Those of you shocked to see us on SEO blog topics right now can rest assured we’re struggling to stay on topic.

No “SOPA Fight” Ruling Until New Year?

As a follow up to our ongoing coverage of the SOPA debate, It looks as though the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee will postpone any ruling son the controversial Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) until after the Congress holiday break.

Texas Republican Representative Lamar Smith stated on Friday that he would consider a hearing or a classified briefing on the bill’s potential impact on cyber-security.

The new bill has raised concerns from over 80 Internet engineers and cyber-security experts as it would provide ISPs and domain name registrars the ability to block the domain names of foreign websites accused of copyright infringement.

Several opponents of the bill that are on the Judiciary Committee include Republicans Chaffetz, Darrell Issa of California and Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, as well as Democrats Zoe Lofgren of California and Jared Polis of Colorado.

Chaffetz stated "We have deep concerns about what this will do to cyber security," and that, "I think it would be dangerous for members on this committee to vote on final passage of this bill without having at least one hearing and some clarification" on the security impact.

Virginia Republican, Bob Goodlatte, said the right for copyright holders to seek court orders is a "key provision" of SOPA. "If you are not going to allow this legal relief, you are severely damaging the bill," he said.

If passed, the new bill would give the U.S. Department of Justice significant powers to target foreign copyright infringements. Sensenbrenner said. "Enforcement should be a law enforcement function in this area," he said. "We don’t give people very many opportunities to sue everybody in the world when law enforcement doesn’t do what they want them to do."

The bill would also allow the DOJ to seek similar court orders targeting ad networks and payment processors. The DOJ could also use this bill to seek court orders barring search engines from linking to allegedly infringing sites, requiring domain name registrars to take down the websites and requiring Internet service providers to block subscriber access to the sites.

By the time I finished this post, I came across another post that stated the "SOPA has NOT been postponed to 2012! The Committee members who support SOPA quietly changed the hearing date to the 21st, trying to trick the American people into thinking it was over for the year. This is dirty politics and should be illegal. Fight back. Let them know this is not over."