Posts About ‘Social search’

Social Signals, Schmochal Smignals?

Social Signals - do they effect rank?

Last week, I put together a workshop for Receptional Internet Marketing and sparked a very interesting debate: do Social Signals even affect page rank?  Or is it a big Google-myth?

On one side of the table there were the more technical SEO guys  who made some pretty compelling arguments favouring the opinion that Social Signals 100% do affect search rankings.  On the other side, was the side of the table that felt that while Social Signals are important to the online marketing mix, Google hasn t explicitly said that they do yet. (more…)

Assessing the Non-Financial Benefits of Social Media Investment

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On Thursday I’m speaking at Digital Content Monetization Europe on a topic that regularly dumbfounds marketers: social media monetisation. My research for the presentation took me down three possible benefits of social media when it comes to Return on Investment:

  • Making Money – Conversions and advertising
  • Non-Financial Impacts – Traffic increases, acquiring more followers/Likes etc
  • Cost Saving –Savings on media spend, business process and customer service (more…)

Beware of Personalised Search! Information Dystopia and Online ‘Filter Bubbles’

The Effect of the Filter Bubble

Last year Eli Pariser spoke at TED, covering a topic that we’re all becoming increasingly affected by while navigating the web. Eli introduced his theory on the online ‘filter bubble’, explaining that through the continuous quest to ‘personalise’ search results, our online environments are becoming less and less diverse.

Hi everyone, I am Ned and this is my first (proper) post on State of Search. I’ve become fairly annoyed lately with many of the websites I visit regularly and spend a lot of time on, like: Amazon, Facebook and Google (after all, I am an SEO), that are becoming incredibly ‘samey’ places to hang out and discover information online. So much of the content that I see every day is either something I’ve already seen or, worse, nothing to do with what I was looking for in the first place! This is one of the effects that Eli refers to when talking about online ‘filter bubbles’. (more…)

What is Google+ Really all About?

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Google+ is Google’s Social Network, or at least, that is what we all think it is. It is Google’s effort to push out Facebook and to be the biggest not just in search, but also in social. But in fact Google+ is not intended to be that Facebook killer. Yes, off course, if Google gets the chance, they will definitely try to beat Facebook. But Google+ in fact is more about data: it will be part of every Google product in the future.

If you listen carefully to what Googlers are saying you will get some nice insights into what the intentions from Google are. They are going to change the online world with Google Plus and the crux is data, identification, personalization and integration.

Note: this post has been edited since it first was published in July 2011, just after the launch of Google+. The essence of the post is still the same, but information which enriches the post has been added. (more…)

Zuckerberg: Facebook Is Going Into Search. The Question is: How?

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It has been a discussion for ages: will Facebook ever go into search. And if they do, will they be the long awaited Google killer? Can they beat Google at their own game?

Many didn’t even expect Facebook to go into search anymore, after all, why didn’t they do it before? Yesterday at the TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco Mark Zuckerberg told the audience in his first interview since the failed IPO “At some point, we’ll do it”. (more…)

Facebook Rolls out Sponsored Results Search Ads

Facebook-search-ads

Facebook Search is not the best search engine out there. Still for many it is a starting point when looking for people, pages or apps. That’s why it is an interesting area for advertisers to be in. After some initial tests Facebook is now rolling out sponsored results in the search results.

On the developer blog Facebook has announced the new feature as one of several updates they made this week amongst which an SDK for iOS Update and changes to profile pictures, but this one is the most interesting one. The feature will make that when you start searching for a name you might not see a person first, but a sponsored result. (more…)

Google Launches +1 Recommendations Today (Update)

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We’ve reported not too long ago on the fact that Google was testing out a new feature in a special Google+ Group. Today Google is rolling out this feature to everyone. This feature changes the +1 button to become a recommendation button.

Until now the button was mainly used for acknowledging a page is to your liking and you could share through it as well. Now Google is adding recommendations.

The recommendations will be from the site you are visiting and will mean another boost for the usage of the +1 button without a doubt, because it suddenly became interesting for website owners to persuade you to click the +1 button, because it will show you more from that specific site. (more…)

Google Removes Social Circle Data

Google-Social-404

Google Search Plus Your World is all about social data. Many things Google does in social is aimed at getting information from you so they can build up your profile and return you search results and other related information which is personalised for you, based on your social graph.

To do that Google needs to know your social graph. It needs to know how you connect to entities and to other people. In some of my presentations I showed some of what Google knew of you because Google gave that information away, for free. Now it seems to have pulled the social circle data. There is no announcement and you can still find the search result, but the page itself gives a 404. (more…)

The Psychology of Search

SAScon: Bas van den Beld speaking about psychology of search

Next up on the coverage of the 2nd day of SAScon is a talk by State of Search’s very own chief editor Bas van den Beld, who talks about the psychology of search.

Bas starts of by showing a picture of his children, and then pointing out that this is the homepage of his browser – a Google search page with a custom background. Bas says that a lot of the things Google have been doing is about making search personal. (more…)

Google+ify Or Die

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Danny started by giving the background on Google+ and how we need to engage with it to expand and future proof our SEO strategies.

Bas van den Beld, Chief Editor, State of Search

Bas started by going through the numbers. Google + is still very small when compared to Facebook from an engagement and a visitor perspective. This leads to apathy towards Google+ but there is more to it than that. Eric Schmidt’s recent quote about everything moving towards the Google + platform in the future shows how important it is.

Mind set

People are using Google+ because they have to. The mind set is key. The most basic human needs is the need to connect with others. It’s a nice sentiment but how is it important? Google has started analysing how people work and are translating that to the search engine. People trust authorities, People want what others have which is largely fuelled by jealousy. We are also open to peer pressure. We also like to spread the word about products and other people.


Google + is bringing in these elements into the search environment. Stop thinking they will kick out Facebook, it’s to get a grip on who we are. It’s all about data. We are getting personalised results in the US already and that’s coming to Europe soon. This is all to figure out who you are, who your friends are, what you do and to which entities you are connected. Go to http://google.com/s2/search/social#gd and you can see who Google thinks you are connected to. These connections power Google social search and they are constantly trying to get more of the offline world online.

How do these factors influence the results?

They are showing authoritative people within each sector. Rel Author is also powering this. Personalised search is also sharing other things like who is at which event. The images increase the amount of click through for those results. You can also thank people that share your content. Google results are also showing conversations in Google+ and you can participate in that conversation in the search results.

How do you use this?

People are more interested in the stuff their social circle share than your stuff. Your target audience are the people that share your content as much as the people that are buying your product. Find your brand advocates. Make sure that you make your content shareable. Work on your social circle and create content that your market wants.

Kevin Gibbons, Director of Strategy, SEOptimise

Kevin wanted to share how much juice you get from Google+, in theory annotations can increase your CTR by 5- 10% according to Google.

1)      Miele: 19% CTR without +1s and 0% with the +1s.

2)      Soft32 has 456 people that like their brand page – 9% CTR without +1s and 5% CTR with +1s

Overall in both CTR cases G+ had a negative impact but it actually makes sense because the +1 listings are less relevant than the informational results. The second reason is that the brand CTR is always going to be big compared to the deeper pages. Kevin argues that the CTR is really not the major win. The win is that you are getting traffic you would not otherwise get.

He tested clients with G+ vs. clients without.

They saw a 19.5% decrease in organic traffic for clients that aren’t using Google+. The converse was true with clients seeing a 43% increase in clients that did use Google+.

Asos is doing a lot with Google+ which has had a major search impact for Asos.com search impact. They are seeing a 100% improvement on organic traffic.

This doesn’t mean that Google+ has a direct correlation to organic rankings. Google+ doesn’t really matter at the moment in the algo but it is very likely to be there in the future. Google + is being pushed like crazy with 353 million pages indexed.

With Google penguin making things harder links are becoming more outdated as an authority element. This paves the way for social signals to form a bigger part of the algorithm.

5 tips for G+

1)      Focus your SEO strategy on great content, don’t chase the algorithm, build great content

2)      Build a great content team. Community managers, bloggers, content strategists, infographic designers, guest authors and video producers are all key parts of SEO teams in the future. Bring in people that can make your content stand out more.

3)      Use rel=author to get more value

4)      Create a G+ brand page and link to your site this syncs up your home page + 1s with your brand + 1s. Brand page +1s have been shown to influence search more than home page + 1s

5)      Go in once a day and share your post and comment on your friend’s posts

Google + Tools:

1)      View your social connections to a scary level (link is above in Bas’ presentation)

2)      Find influencers on findpeopleonplus.com

3)      Analyse your reach on Google+ Ripples and evaluate people that share people like you

4)      Social sources analytics stream in GA

So in summary G+ has a negative CTR but that doesn’t matter because they are ranking better because of it. Ensure that content marketing is a central part of your SEO strategy.

Bing Launches “The New Bing”: Search Goes Social In Extreme

New-Bing-Coming-soon-1

Bing has been a bit ‘quiet’ over the past few years, we were all wondering whether the people at Microsoft had given up on the battle with Google and if they might even consider selling the engine to Facebook.

Then last week Bing suddenly came out with a new whiter design. Much more like how Google used to be. Was this a move which was a response to Google’s more and more cluttered search results? Maybe a little, but yesterday it became all clear why: Bing ‘relaunched’ into “The New Bing”, “a brand new information architecture with a three column design”.

Bing integrates social into search as well as what they call a ‘snapshot’, a column which helps you ‘do’ things a lot faster, like instantly booking a hotel. (more…)

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