Google has defined how people use the internet for over a decade. Commonly used as a portal to access even the most familiar internet resources such as Facebook, Hotmail and Youtube. I can recount many occasions where I’ve looked over someone’s shoulder as they’ve typed www.hotmail.com into the Google search box.
The average internet experience consisted of accessing your “home zone” (websites you use regularly) via Google, spending time on these familiar websites and exploring the internet using Google search. Google’s market domination is founded on their search engines ability to deliver relevant search results more effectively than anything else. However, with the rise of social media not only is internet behaviour evolving rapidly, so is search: it’s becoming social.
Google: Listening to Conversations
Google’s algorithm takes into account over 200 different factors when defining the rank and relevancy of web pages for search terms. Refined over time the algorithm includes software such as Google Page Rank, which relies heavily on analysing links. Google have been able to improve their search engine results pages by filtering out the activities of Black Hat SEO’s. The difficulty of manipulating links made it much more challenging to manipulate the SERP’s than techniques such as keyword stuffing relied on in the past. However, even links can and are being manipulated, so Google has started to take into account factors even harder to manipulate, conversations.
The announcement that Google has introduced social search hasn’t come as a surprise to many online marketers and SEO’s. As well as being the next logical step in their algorithms evolution, social search is taking market share and revenue so it was only a matter of time before Google made steps to capitalise on social search.
Social Media and Online PR
Yesterday the BBC’s Working Lunch looked at the effects of social media and social networking websites on the online reputation of businesses. In their aptly named; “The Art of Complaining,” the latest challenges businesses are facing to improve online PR involve joining social media conversations. When social search becomes more prominent in the Google search results page it will be even more important for businesses to be aware of their online PR and the tools available to improve it. The extent to which social search will effect Google’s search engine results pages remains to be seen, but there is little doubt that social media marketing is something that businesses can’t afford to ignore.
