No one will be more affected by Google’s move than the SEO professionals themselves

I just spent some time reading the next web article What does Google’s social search mean for SEO’s.  Please read this article and the quotes from the industries’ top figures. Google has great tools for businesses to promote themselves such as Youtube, Product search, Maps and Adwords and many more.

I was visiting with friends not too long ago and we were chatting about how we used to spend so much time preparing our Yellow page campaigns six months before they were going to even be published. That seems to be so long ago, but it hasn’t even been 15 years.

Here are some of my favorite segments of the article.

1) The principle idea behind the new Google feature is to offer users more personalized results. The method, which puts a heck of a lot of  Google eggs in the Plus basket, has seen a pretty strong initial backlash, and some users have even gone so far as todelete their Google+ accounts.

2) No one will be more affected by Google’s move than the SEO professionals themselves, so we asked them, what they thought of the change, how it affects the SEO industry and their work.

3) Rand Fishkin
Content creation and promotion via social media has long been a part of SEO, albeit not central to the practice. Google’s “Search Plus Your World” will likely increase the value in producing and spreading socially-targeted content as well as give SEOs even more incentive to grow their networks. Over time, inbound marketing as a whole (the combination of content, search, social and conversion practices) seems likely to overtake the “pure SEO” tactics of accessibility, keyword research, content optimization and link-building as job responsibilities for web marketers.

Google obviously benefits tremendously from social signals. They had a great product during their partnership with Twitter and “Search Plus Your World” looks very similar to a replacement for the data they lost when that partnership ended. It’s also a not-too-subtle way of forcing businesses, marketers and individuals with search ranking aspirations into using Google+. I’d say Google’s only real risk/danger here is if the world’s governments decide this is an abuse of their monopolistic stranglehold on the search market to force users into their social network.

4) Joost de Valk
Google+ being “bundled” is not that much different from Microsoft bundling a browser in its operating system. I fully expect the EU to take issue with it. For the user, I think it’s great, but there are definitely anti trust issues.

As for SEO: no SEO will be able to ignore Google+, but that’s been true since its inception. People with large numbers of followers will possibly see an uptake in traffic because of this, but that’s not a change for SEOs. Good SEOs will keep doing what they do: make sites technically excellent, write great content and promote it everywhere… You can bet on even more snake oil SEOs selling google pluses though, and loads of people falling for that

5) Looking at it from nothing more than an SEO standpoint, companies can continue to use the exact same method used with Google’s algorithm in mind, while also placing more emphasis on social integration into their marketing tactics. And if they’re not already doing that in some way, shape or form, they have far more to worry about.

6) But not everyone thinks that’s a good thing. Traditional SEO places most of the power in the influential publishers’ hands, and loopholes allow them to game the system. Social search places most of the power in the consumers’ hands, but because it requires real human interaction, it becomes far more difficult to game. And like Joost de Valk says, we’re bound to see people cashing in on +1 scams left, right and centre.

Tags: Google Plus, social

This entry was posted on January 17, 2012 at 8:56 am and is filed under Business, Google, Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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