SOCIAL SIGNALS

AND SEARCH Benedict Hayes Vice President Strategy

iProspect Communicate 2

“ BASIC SEO FOLLOW GOOGLE’S MISSION

To organize the world’s information and make

it universally accessible and useful!

“ BASIC SEO FOLLOW GOOGLE’S MISSION

We organize our information, make it

universally accessible and useful!

4

How do

Social Signals

fit in?

OF OLD

6

SEO OF OLD WHERE HAD WE EVOLVED TO…

WHAT

CHANGED?

7

DOOMSDAY

FOR SEO

THE P-TEAM The Internet Sheriffs

Penguin Penguin 2.0 Panda

10

DETERMINE

11

Targets:

• Low quality links / Paid links

• Irrelevance

• Over optimised anchor texts

• Automation

THE PENGUIN UPDATES THE END OF SPAMMY LINKS

The Fix:

• Avoid links from poor quality resources

• Avoid unnaturally high frequencies of exact match anchors

• Use the disavow tool

PENGUIN UPDATE WHAT TO DO?

Targets:

• Thin content

• Content farms

• Content quality

PANDA UPDATE THE END OF BAD CONTENT

The Fix:

• Create brilliant unique content that engages and is above all useful

• Avoid content networks

• No content spinning

• Author and link your content

• Manage bounce rates

PANDA UPDATE WHAT TO DO?

Rolling updates!

DOES SEO

HAVE A

FUTURE?

FOLLOW THE

MISSION

Architecture

Site Structure

Content Structure

Mark-up

Sitemaps

Content

Unique

Timely

Relevance

Keywords

Credibility

Links

Citations

Social Signals

AuthorRank

Engagement

Time on-site

Conversion optmisation

Bounce rates

Speed

WHICH IN PRACTICE…

Organize Information Universally Accessible

Useful

ORGANISE, INFORMATION, ACCESSIBILITY, USEFUL

DETERMINING

USEFUL?

Page

Ran

k

Links En

gage

men

t Bounce Rate Sp

eed

Load Times V

iral

ity

Social Signals

DETERMINING USEFUL

WHY SOCIAL?

• Google has been using social media to gauge how useful content is for a long time

• After all you can’t beat human sentiment to understand if something is good or bad

• Social Signals give you this

SOCIAL MEDIA

• Social interactions such as comments, likes, shares, tweets, +1s are effectively endorsements

• More so reviews with integrated microdata these are extremely good for giving weight and value to content

• After all these are real endorsements of content as opposed to your easily manipulated or contrived links

SOCIAL MEDIA

• SEOmoz investigations found that Google used to use twitter and Facebook as a direct measure of sentiment… Google denied…

• It was true there was a time you could use twitter to generate instant results in Google… but not anymore

TWITTER

The principle is simple - what could be better for Google than an actual person endorsing content?

…you own the person!

INTEGRATION OF SOCIAL

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF GOOGLE+

Twitter and Facebook would not play with Google

So Google did it alone..

INTEGRATION

• Through Google+ Google will deliver 100 times better results

• If they truly know you, your friends, what you like, what you don’t like, they can advertise and personalise information for you and only…

YOU!

GOOGLE+

• Simplistically if my friends like it surely I will like it….

HOW DOES THIS EFFECT PERSONLISED SEARCH?

• If you do not begin to build a sentiment graph for your content where influencers share and like your content and link back to you, you will not be the most useful popular guy in town someone else will

HOW DOES THIS EFFECT SEO?

THE DARK SIDE

SOCIAL SPAM

Not possible…

• Google controls – The people

– The content

• They can see – The intricacies of the connections

– The IPs of the users the types and places of the +1s, the frequency and from where

BLACK: SOCIAL SPAM? GOOGLE+

Not possible…

• Aggressive in built vetting system to detect fraud and delete fake accounts

BLACK: SOCIAL SPAM? FACEBOOK

Not possible…

• No followers where is the value?

BLACK: SOCIAL SPAM? TWITTER

WHAT ARE

SOCIAL SIGNALS

36

Bookmark

Vote

Post

Re-share

Comment Review

Your social ecosystem

37

DIRECT BENEFIT OF SOCIAL SIGNALS BRAND VISIBILITY TRAFFIC GENERATION

CONTENT The viral connect of Social Signals is like a sounding beacon of content quality…

38

39

HOW THE RESULTS ARE CHANGING THE MORE SOCIAL WE GET THE MORE THEY WILL CHANGE

Word of

Mouth

40

HOW THE RESULTS ARE CHANGING REVIEWS

41

CORRELATING SEARCH DATA STUDY BY SEARCH METRICS

CLEAR

INDICATORS

OF INTENT

43

TWITTER + GOOGLE IT STOPPED JULY 2011

44

SOCIAL SEARCH RESULTS NO LONGER AVAILABLE BUT…

45

ALTHOUGH NOW REMOVED… +1 METRICS IN WEBMASTER TOOLS

46

GOOGLE ANALYTICS SOCIAL INTERACTION TRACKING

47

G+ AUTHOR INTEGRATION

CONTENT MARKETING A need for a new approach

Homepage

Product Page

Info Page Contact

Page

Tell-tale signs:

• Disproportionate number of links to a single page

• High proportion exact match anchors

• Large number of links with no links to the link

• Poor quality resources linking

SEO OF OLD BUILD AS MANY LINKS AS POSSIBLE TO DESIRED RANKING PAGE

Penguin and Panda are gonna get yah!

Homepage

Product Page

Details

More info

Info Page Contact

Page

The new approach:

• Create brilliant content

• Market that content

• Vary the link footprint

• Link to all parts of the site

• Only link links that are useful to the user i.e. relevant

• Socialize your linking content and your pages

• Use all forms of content to link

SEO TODAY CREATE QUALITY CONTENT THAT IS USEFUL AND LINK FROM IT.

• If the content that links to you has no links where is the value?

Ask Yourself:

• Why would someone link to your linking content?

Because the content is good!

LINKS TO LINKS THE NEED FOR CONTENT MARKETING

5% 10%

75%

10%

Unnatural Link Footprints

Brand keywords

Brand + Exact

Exact Match

Other

LINK RATIO AVOID HIGH VOLUMES OF EXACT MATCH ANCHOR TEXTS

50%

15%

10%

25%

Natural Link Footprints

Use internal link architecture and anchors to pass context rather than external anchors

High intensity of links to a single page within the site with exact anchors suggests SEO foul play

SITE LINK HEATMAP AVOID HEAVY CLUSTERS OF LINKS TO SINGLE PAGES OF THE SITE

Homepage

Product Page

IDENTIFYING GOOD LINKS TELL-TALE SIGNS OF A GOOD LINK

• Has anyone shared it on social media platforms

• Has anyone linked to it • Does the link carry

PageRank • As there been any social

interactions / comments • Has Google cached the

page? • Does the content rank for

it’s title in the SERPs?

AUTHOR RANK A brief overview of

AuthorRank + PageRank = Better Rankings

RANKINGS

AUTHORRANK THE NEW PAGERANK

Avg. PR of Content

+1s / Shares per post

Relative authority on non-Google

social platforms

Authority of publishing site

Posting frequency

# of circlers

Outside authority indicators

Google+ engagement

level

GOOGLE+ INTEGRATION

Example of a fully integrated author

LINKING UP YOUR AUTHORED CONTENT

• If your author owns a personal site: <a rel="author" href="http://myblog.com" />Benedict Hayes</a>

• …and a Twitter / Google+ handle <a rel="me" href="http://twitter.com/authorname" />Twitter</a>

<a rel="me" href="http://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202" />Google+</a>

• No personal site just Google+ In page markup:

<a rel="author" href="http://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202" />Benedict Hayes</a>

Head Tag:

<link rel="author" href="http://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202" />

Or

<link rel="publisher" href="http://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202" />

LINK REL="ME" / "AUTHOR" CORRELATING CONTENT

TO CONCLUDE

• Social Signals are here to stay

• Things that can be easily contrived will fade away

• These signals will only get stronger

• Brands that do not embrace sharing of content will suffer in the long term

62

CONCLUSION

THANK YOU

QUESTIONS?

Benedict Hayes Vice President Strategy

@benboombastic

benedict.hayes@iprospectc2.com