http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLp9Qf99DCI

• More than 660 million active users
• 50% of active users log on to the site in any given day
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on FaceBook
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 60 million status updates posted each day
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded on the site each month
• There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month
• More than 3 million active pages
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active pages
• More than 20 million people become fans of pages each day
• More than 5.3 billion fans are created by Pages
• Average user has 130 friends
• Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
• Average user spends 55 minutes on FaceBook
• Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
• Average user writes 25 comments on FaceBook content each month
• Average user becomes a fan of 4 pages each month
• Average user is invited to 3 events per month
• Average user is a member of 13 groups
• More than 70 translations available on the site
• Top countries using FaceBook are US, UK, Indonesia, Turkey, France, Italy, Canada, Philippines and Mexico
• More than 100 million active users currently access FaceBook through their mobile phones

Twitter

• More than 106 million accounts
• Number of Twitter users increases by 300,000 everyday
• 3 Billion requests each day generated by 180 million unique visitors
• 95 million tweets per day, that gives circa 640 tweets per second
• Twitter’s search engine gets 600 million queries every day
• Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter
• 10-11pm is the most active hour on twitter
• Top languages used are English, Portuguese, Japanese and Spanish
• Top countries using twitter are US, India, Japan, Germany, UK, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Australia and Spain
• More than 70,000 applications have been created using Twitter API
• More than 67% of Twitter messages are in the form of user’s current status, private conversation and links to news and blog articles

As you can see, social media sites like Facebook & Twitter (among others) really do play an active role in organic search engine results and that trend is on the rise. No one can predict the future, but it seems likely that the major search engines will continue to move in this direction.

We specialize in helping business owners, like you, build a strong and meaningful presence on the web.

Points Raised

According to Hudgens, Twitter is acting very much like the link exchanges of the pre-Twitter era, except that it’s doing so in a dramatically higher volume. Additionally, the kinds of links being shared on Twitter are the same as they were during the hayday of blogs and news aggregators. Hudgens thinks that because of this:

[…] any distribution of the non-social (see: payday loans, insurance, etc) is unusual, and large link spikes or unusual link profiles will be quickly noticed and devalued, if not de-indexed for their transgressions.

According to Hudgens, for these exact reasons, SEO will mostly remain unchanged. Especially businesses that will remain unfriendly to conversation (i.e., social interaction) to which social media integration will mean little to nothing.

However, Hudgens notes:

[...] in verticals where content is king, linkbait is the meal of choice and “the conversation” means everything, the Twitter world will have to be taken very seriously.

With regards to trust factor, Hudgens thinks that factors (similar to those Google is using on sites/pages) will come into play to leverage profile trust and how it will impact the SERPs. Hudgens enumerates his “candidates” as follows:

• Follower count -  Things like follower interaction & the followed-to-following count of its followers can be weighed to determine how trustworthy the web has determined this Twitter account to be.

• Use of @accountname – The volume of @accountname appearances (resulting from unsolicited user interactions or retweets of content) on Twitter is a strong indicator of trust. Even if someone is making lots of cold interactions with fake followers to increase this, it will take some sort of trust for the act to be reciprocated. The ratio and volume of these occurrences can be seen as strong indicators of account trust.

• Account age and “confirmed” accounts – Twitter, working with Google, could automatically provide trust to those accounts Twitter deems as “confirmed accounts”, as they will often receive immediate following spikes that are unnatural to other users. For those that have to grind to accumulate real following counts, age seems like something that may be a bigger part of a natural trust growth cycle more than the actual account date of birth itself.

• Account theme – People tweet and discuss about certain things more than others. Sooner or later, this could lead profiles into developing a theme.

But why would Google do this? Hudgens sees news aggregation as the possible primary reason.

According to Hudgens, the problem with the current system is that media outlets, which have strangleholds on news aggregation, are not always the most topical, relevant result for the engines.

Hudgens says that these outlets are mostly ranked based on their domain authority and on-page SEO rather than which one is actually the best article. Twitter can help Google greatly in picking out the authority article for a news piece through retweets and trusted dissemination of the information.

Hudgens also mentions something similar to what Fishkin have earlier raised regarding Twitter cannibalizing blogging, saying that bloggers are not linking out as much as they did before and that people are dropping socially-worthy pieces on their Twitter feeds and sharing on Facebook. Google, according to Hudgens, have to incorporate these new psychological linking tendencies into the SERPS to get a true appropriation of how their users view the web.

Another thing is Facebook’s open graph. The new, publicly interpretable “like” numbers can be translated as votes of trust in pretty much the same way as the earlier mentioned Twitter metrics. However, Hudgens raised two possible reasons why this probably won’t happen (at least not any time soon). One is that Google sees Facebook as a threat. And, along with that, it seems to be against the privacy dilemmas the graph presents.

Two is that this is a brand new announcement, and that makes implementation of data of this sort likely to be much further away from ever being implemented.

NoFollow and Title Tags

In his article dated November 10, 2010, Tad Miller quoted Googler John Mu as saying:

Various parts of our algorithms can apply to sites at different times, depending on what our algorithms find. While we initially rolled out this change earlier this year, the web changes, sites change, and with that, our algorithms will continually adapt to the current state on the web, on those sites.

From this, Miller noted that if Google’s search algorithms were to adapt to the way the web changes, it makes sense that Google would try to incorporate the massive number of shared, but nofollowed links on Twitter and Facebook into their algorithm.

With regards to the use of shortened URLs on Twitter, Miller noted that Google has been found to be substituting/recognizing the page title tags of shared shortened links as anchor text for real time search.

To quote Miller:

By utilizing the Title Tag as the link’s Anchor Text Google has found some text to associate with the link, just like it would with “dofollow” anchor text that would pass on Page Rank.  Title Tags have always been important for SEO from a Content Perspective, if shared shortened links from Twitter ever do count in an algorithm Title Tags become doubly important as both links and content.

This, Miller says, is very much like what Facebook does with links—that it transforms the shared link into an anchor text link of the page’s title tag.

Speaking of Facebook, Miller mentions noticing something strange with regards to links they were getting from Facebook:

We have really been noticing Facebook links coming through our clients Link Data in Google Webmaster Tools from individuals non-private pages and from company pages in very large numbers of late.  Strangely, the URLs that Google is finding these links on are ALL Facebook links from foreign countries.  None of them are for a plain old “facebook.com” URL.  We have seen Facebook-Cyprus, Facebook-Wales and Facebook-Korea.  Why the end around to get to the data?  I have no idea.[…]

What encourages me that the nofollow attribute isn’t mattering as much as it used to to Google is that I’m seeing my clients Title Tags show up in Google Webmaster Tools in the Anchor Text Section in fairly large numbers.  Many of those Title Tags are very distinct phrases that no one would intentionally make anchor text, so we are pretty sure that they are coming from Facebook, Twitter and other social bookmarks.

For this, Miller advises that title tags be chosen carefully and that keywords must be used in them.

Finally, Confirmation

On December 1, 2010, Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan came out with an article that exposed some details regarding which social signals are affecting SERP rankings.

According to Sullivan, both Google and Bing have told him that who you are as a person on Twitter can impact how well a page does in regular web search. Authoritative people on Twitter lend their authority to pages they tweet.

As for Facebook, the two search giants have differing answers. Bing says it doesn’t try to calculate someone’s authority while Google, on the other hand, says it does, in some limited cases.

With regards to the nofollow attribute, both search engines confirm that the links that are going through Twitter’s “firehose” of data (to them) do not carry the nofollow attributes.

According to Bing, instead of the nofollow attribute, they take into consideration how often a link has been tweeted or retweeted, as well as the authority of the Twitter users that shared the link. Google, on the other hand, says that they use the data only in limited situations, not for all of general Web search.

The Questions (and the Answers)

Following are the questions Sullivan sent over to the search giants, along with their responses.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• Do you track links shared within Facebook, either through personal walls or fan pages?

Bing: Yes. We look at links shared that are marked as “Everyone,” and links shared from Facebook fan pages.

Google: We treat links shared on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links. We have no personal wall data from Facebook.

• Do you try to calculate the authority of someone on Facebook, either say via their personal wall or their fan page.

Bing: We don’t do this on Facebook. On Facebook, we only get what’s public, only updates and things you’ve posted to everyone as viewable. We don’t get things only shared with friends, so don’t know how authoritative you are on Facebook. There isn’t the whole convenient retweet mechanism we see on Twitter.

We do see valuable content shared by Facebook users, even though we only get what’s public.  For example when Gary Coleman died we saw a video from Different Strokes, saying his favorite line “what ya talk’in ’bout Willis” gain popularity.  It happened to be what a lot of people are sharing on the day he passed away.

Google: Again, the treatment is the same as for Twitter. And we have no personal wall data from Facebook.

• Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who shared it on Facebook?

Bing: We can tell if something is of quality on Facbook by leveraging Twitter. If the same link is shared in both places, it’s more likely to be legitimate.

Google: Same as question 5.

• And just to be really clear, the new Facebook data is not yet being used in ordinary web search, right? (asked only of Bing, because it was only relevant to them)

No.

From the interview, Sullivan concluded that retweets is the new link building.

Sullivan advises:

Get your page mentioned in tweets by authoritative people, and that can help your ranking in regular search results, to a degree.

More Speculations

As you probably already know, the search giants, most especially Google, do not reveal much of anything to anybody regarding its search engine (or anything, for that matter). And just like what has happened so many times in the past, the answers that Danny Sullivan got only led to more guesses and speculations.

Immediately following Sullivan’s article, Rand Fishkin came out with another article where he laid out his guesses/speculations about how Bing and Google are determining what to rank on their SERPs, as well as the signals they are using to determine and establish Author/Social Authority.

Sullivan identifies the following as the things that the search giants are possibly looking at in determining a page’s ranking:

1)   Diversity of Sources – having 50 tweets of a link from one account is not nearly as valuable as 50 tweets from 50 unique accounts.

2)   Timing – links that are shared shortly after an RSS feed first publishes a story may be indicative of Query Deserves Freshness (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).

3)   Surrounding Content – the message(s) accompanying the link may give the engines substantive information about their potential relevance and topic; it could also take the place of anchor texts, particularly on Twitter.

4)   Engagement Level – the quantity of clicks, retweets, likes, etc. could impact how much weight is given to the link.

As for the possible factors for determining Author/Social Authority:

• Quantity of Friends/Followers – Like links, according to Sullivan, it’s likely the case that having more friends/followers is better. However, he warns that low quality bots and inauthentic accounts are likely to be filtered. And Sullivan thinks that due to the challenges that bots and inauthentic accounts will be facing in acquiring followers/friends, the search engines will probably have an easier time spotting them than they do in weeding out spammy links.

• Importance of Friends/Followers – Again, just like links. If you are hounded by high “authority” followers, it can send a very good signal about yourself.

• 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 versus true interest and engagement may be part of authority scoring. For example, if you have 100,000 followers and you follow 99,000 of them, and the engagement between you and your followers is slim, you’re likely not going to be recognized as authoritative as the owner of an account with 1,000 followers who are constantly engaged, retweeting, liking, sharing, etc.

• Topic Focus (Theme) / Relevance – The consistency or patterns between a person’s sharing behaviors could also be a consideration (using topic analysis and patterns in the sources of shared/tweeted links, etc.). Being an “authority” could even be subject-specific. For example, if a prominent SEO tweets links to celebrity news, it will have less of an impact as compared to when that person tweets links to a web marketing resource.

• Association Bias – Google and Bing probably has the ability to associate social authors with the sites/domains they’re part of and those that they’re independent from (Google Profiles comes to mind here).

As you can see, social media sites like Facebook & Twitter (among others) really do play an active role in organic search engine results and that trend is on the rise. No one can predict the future, but it seems likely that the major search engines will continue to move in this direction.

We specialize in helping business owners, like you, build a strong and meaningful presence on the web.

Twitter and Facebook’s Influence on SEO

Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has said that Google makes over 400 changes to their algorithms every year. But despite all those changes, search engine optimization has remained pretty much the same.

Keywords, inbound links, anchor text, HTML title tags, relevant/unique content, landing pages, loading times, quality scores—for a long time, these have been what optimizing Web sites/pages for search engines (i.e., SEO) was all about.

Then Came Facebook and Twitter

The date was July 1st, 2009.

Facebook at the time was still months away from acquiring its 300 millionth user and Twitter had just recorded 44.5 million unique visits worldwide during the previous month. Just so that you know, Facebook now ( April 2011) has more than 660 million users and Twitter is currently attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating over 65 million tweets daily.

The Bing team made a blog post announcing that they were going to start showing tweets (twitter messages) of “some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres” alongside Bing’s search results.

The post named Danny Sullivan, Kara Swisher, Al Gore, and Ryan Seacrest as examples of those “prolific Twitterers”.

Quoting from the blog post:

There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space.

Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results.

The announcement, however, was generally met with little excitement as some people thought that all Bing was doing was showing tweets from well-known people which only appear when a user searches for that person’s name and the word “Twitter” in the same query (e.g., “Kara Swisher Twitter”, “Kara Swisher Tweets”, and “@karaswisher”). In addition, Bing was doing it using Twitter’s API which makes it seem to be just another widget that shows someone’s most recent tweets. (Image courtesy of Bing.)

A little over a month later (October 21st, 2009), at the Web 2.0 Summit, Qi Lu (president of Microsoft’s online services division) announced that Microsoft had integrated Twitter tweets and Facebook status updates into its Bing search results.

Microsoft’s VP of Microsoft’s online audience business group, Yusuf Mehdi, took over after the announcement to “demonstrate” the answer in what he called Bing “Wave 2″, saying: “We are going to get access to all the public Twitter information in real time…” and “The other deal we have done will come with all the publically available data on Facebook, and services from that will come at a later date.“

One of the features Mehdi introduced was the tag cloud that is displayed on the top portion of Bing’s Twitter search page which reflects/shows the “hottest topics” currently being discussed on Twitter.

On the same day of the announcement, Microsoft released a beta version of Bing’s Twitter search, making it available to everyone to play with.

This was how it looked like at the time:

Note: Bing’s Twitter search have since been modified and is now known as Bing Social (http://www.bing.com/social)

Just a few moments after Bing’s announcement, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, took to the stage and made a very brief announcement of her own, saying that they have (also) reached an agreement with Twitter to include Tweets (Twitter messages) on their search results.

As it turned out, Mayer’s announcement was just an introduction to what Google really had in store.

According to Mayer, they were working on a new Google Labs project called “Social Search”. What it does, basically, is that based on what the user searches for, Google will look for and retrieve related information from the user’s social networks (which he/she has specified in his/her profile) along with its web search, provided that the user’s contacts have also included their social networks in their Google Profiles.

Some examples of social networks that Mayer gave during the demo are MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

The project has since graduated from Google Labs and is now among Google’s search options/filters.

After the announcements, nobody had any solid idea on how the partnerships will affect the companies involved or, with regards to Bing and Google, how it will affect the search engines, and where it will eventually lead to.

People were generally clueless back then and some SEO practitioners/experts made remarks that now seem to be quite prophetic.

Like this one from Rand Fishkin, CEO of seoMOZ:

If you want your content to prosper in search engines, ignoring social media and Twitter in particular (as well as all the services that feed into and leverage it) is no longer an option. Twitter and SEO are now fundamentally tied together like never before.

And this one from Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch:

Now that Google and Bing are getting the firehose, it could have a big impact on search results.

SEO Speculations

Even before the partnerships were forged among the search engine and social networking giants, some people have speculated that social networks will eventually have an impact on SEO.

One of these were Jeremy Dearringer who, on August 3, 2007, wrote an article entitled “Why Google ranks based upon results from Social Media”.

According to Dearringer, although he hasn’t tested his theory yet and despite the fact that he had no way of proving it, he believes that Social Media can dramatically increase organic ranking aside from link popularity.

Quoting Dearringer:

It’s my belief that Google will rank your website more favorably over time if you have more returning visitors and direct ‘type in the url’ traffic. One of the most powerfully optimized and successful sites I’ve ever created has a ratio of new visitors to returning visitors of 50/50. This site completely dominates an entire competitive market on Google. I do understand that one possibly special cause in variation cannot prove or suggest much of anything. Social Media, an interactive and updated website, valuable content, and traditional marketing can improve these statistics.

Interestingly enough, he ends his article with a quote that says:

The minute you think you’re over-thinking what Google may potentially do, or be capable of doing, you’ve lost the game.

Another is SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin who, on April 2, 2009, wrote a blog post about the decline of linking among blogs.

Rand Fishkin theorized that one of the reasons for the decline is that Twitter is cannibalizing blogging. According to Fishkin, people who used to blog about a site/news article/clever piece of linkbait are now simply tweeting it.

Fishkin went on to speculate that, if his theory is correct, “the search engines will need to start relying on Twitter’s tweet graph, particularly for ‘new’ information and content.”

And like adding fuel to the fire, Google co-founder Larry Page had been quoted as saying:

I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. Now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime.

On June 22, 2010, Rand Fishkin wrote another article that mentions the “rebirth” of editorial citation in the social Web after succumbing to PageRank and self-interested endorsements.

According to Rand Fishkin:

[…] the social web rises with the popularity of sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn. These communities often contain a much higher percentage of editorial citations, particularly those that contain smaller communities inside them (LinkedIn groups, pockets of Twitter users and Facebook friends)

Fishkin says that people from Bing, Google, and the SEO community are aware of this “ecosystem” and are already thinking of how they can leverage it to improve search.

The biggest hurdle they saw was how to weed out the links that exist specifically to influence some sites’ rankings (which Rand Fishkin believes to comprise as much as 20% of all the links found on those sites).

In the article, Rand Fishkin opined that “social” links were still a very small factor in the engines’ ranking algorithms in relation to the overall link graph. However, he said that he thinks Bing and Google were both already racing towards innovation on this front as fast as they can.

Google Highlights ‘Top Links’ in Status Updates

Sometime in April 2010, people noticed something different in Google’s real-time search tools, which primarily gathers Twitter, Friendfeed and public Facebook status updates.

Then you search for a keyword and refine your search results to either “recent” or “updates,” the search engine will also extract the most cited links for that particular keyword.

And when you click the “all mentions” link under a particular link, Google will pull up all the status updates that are pointing to that particular URL.

As you can see, social media sites like Facebook & Twitter (among others) really do play an active role in organic search engine results and that trend is on the rise. No one can predict the future, but it seems likely that the major search engines will continue to move in this direction.

We specialize in helping business owners, like you, build a strong and meaningful presence on the web.