How Social Networks Could Affect Google’s Algorithm
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Posted by Marc Bitanga Apr 28, 2009 |
SEOs like myself are always trying to anticipate the changes that Google makes. As a publisher of a site with over 14 million unique visitors per month, Suite101 not only stays current in its product development and training efforts but also endeavors to stay ahead of the curve by watching emerging trends – all in an effort to bring as many readers to our articles from search engines.
One of the mainstays of Google’s algorithm is its reliance on links between websites. Google uses these links to:
- discover new websites and web pages
- figure out whether your website is a trustworthy source of information by analyzing who links to you and how many websites have linked to your web pages
However, this link-based part of Google’s algorithm may be affected by some pretty monumental changes in the social networking world over the past couple of years.
Facebook has reached 200 million active users, many of whom share links within the walls of this social network. These links are inaccessible to search engines; without access to those links, Google can’t gauge the true popularity and relevance of a website.
Twitter has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity. In March 2009 worldwide visits to the site increased by 95%, from 9.8 million visits to 19.1 million visits. Some bloggers have noted that Twitter could be the reason bloggers are posting fewer articles and fewer visitors are commenting on posts. Fewer blog posts translate into fewer links being shared.
URL Shortening Services
With the rise of Twitter has come an increase in use of URL shortening tools such as tinyurl.com, bit.ly, is.gd, etc. Some URL shortening tools aren’t using 301 HTTP redirects and they definitely don’t use anchor text, both of which are signals that Google has used in its algorithm.
So what has Google done to compensate for this change in user behavior? So far, we haven’t seen any shifts to signal that Google is using social networking behavior in its ranking algorithm. But then again, Google doesn’t exactly telegraph its next move.
What we do know is that social media and social networking is a bigger part of the Internet’s ecosystem today than it was a few years ago. With so many users flocking to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, Google will have to consider changing its formula to adjust to this new reality.