SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search

Moderator:
Massimo Burgio – Global Search Interactive

Speakers:
Bas van den Beld – State of Search
Marcus Taylor – SEOptimise
Jim Yu – BrightEdge
Cedric Chambaz – Microsoft

Bas van den Beld – State of Search

SE’s are trying to figure out user intent and they are trying to give you the best and most relevant info. This can be difficult as a computer at home can be used by multiple people. So they are trying to work on user experience for example showing calories on recipes

Google has chosen two directions to join search and social:

Firstly through Page Rank (Which is essentially a social signal). Google is good at making connections. So they figure they can work out connections between people as well. As Eric Schmidt said :-  ”We know where you are, we know what you like”

Secondly, if people in your social circle rate things then it shows up in the results. You get more tailored and hopefully smarter recommendations. Google +1 and Google hotpot are mechanisms to acquire these social signals and build up your social profile.

The biggest change going on right now is to do with Google accounts and profiles. Interestingly enough the address details are being shown in the SERPs but only to people connected 1 level away from you. If you go to the “Social Connections” tab in your profile you will see the connections. Your Google social circle could be a lot larger than you expect.

Mobile is huge. A computer can be shared. A mobile is very personal. Google can build up a much more detailed profile. For example I searched a route on my desktop, went to my car got out my android and on opening the maps it knew my last search and offered a route.

Main Tip: As a marketer – think ahead. Connect the dots, Work on your social circle

Marcus Taylor – SEOptimise

How important are Facebook likes? I have been running a lot of experiments to test impact on indexation and ranking. There is not very much data, but the correlation between pages that rank well and pages that have been shared or liked is HIGH! We don’t know if there is any causation though.

Google was quoted saying “We treat links on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links. We have no personal wall data from Facebook” via a Search Engine Land interview. It is a bit ambiguous. I wanted to know for ssure so I started experimenting.

I took 2 un-indexed domains with no backlinks with no ability to ping google. I started progressively added likes to them. Within 2-3 hours the domains got indexed!

Does this work for multiple URL’s? I added varying numbers of likes to un-indexed urls and this time looked at the server logs. What I found was zero visits from Googlebot. This was a surprising result on the back of the previous test.

So in conclusion, we cannot indicate casualty and cannot suggest that Likes are a direct ranking factor, however Facebook can refer a large amount of quality traffic it also drives links and other behavioural ranking factors. So perhaps the traffic is more a factor and the actual like itself. For example tweeting a blog post perhaps is not the factor but the behavioural impact of the resultant traffic can be causual in being a ranking factor. Traffic in its own right sends ranking factors!

Jim Yu – BrightEdge

You need to do the analysis by industry – Across several verticals we found correlation between high ranking pages and the fact they had more than 1 tweet or like/share.

For retail and finance, social is critical. There is significant adoption of social . Understand your competitors as there are a lot of individuals that have a lot of tweets and shares and they are doing well compared to the actual brands themselves

Social SEO Techniques

The basics – for example look at deep product page from Overstock.com. Get connected – links back to the main FB and Twitter accounts. There is also a share button on the page and then there is also a like button.

You can target head terms with social media friendly pages to help freshness /recency e.g. virus updates are very time dependent and as such social signals may count more heavily.

Useful products get shared and are less time critical. Time critical products get tweets.

Create parallel structures of social objects and interlink them. Look at Amazon. Not only do they have an Amazon page on FB, they also have pages for Fashion, for video, and other verticals from their site. So sitemap categories and map to FB pages and these then cross link.

Recommendations – Tips and takeaways

1. There is a high correlation – don’t get left behind
2. The basics – Link social pages and make it easy to share etc
3. Go beyond the basics – deep links
4. Create viral content on other channels and drive it into the website
5. Create social objects as parallels and interlink to your directory pages

Cedric Chambaz – Microsoft

Bing – Making it personal.

Search exists to deliver relevant results. We want to fulfil an intent. Using topical qualifiers to rate a page has always been the case, however things have evolved over the years. Today the SE’s are the gateway to all the new content.

We need to get away from the one size fits all. How do we get more personal? Your mobile is very personal and secondly your address book adds more data.

We need to draw a distinction between Searching Social networks and Social Search.

At Bing we differentiated bing.com/social. This is so the results don’t clutter the main index. It is a live search of social feeds that updates in real time.

What if the result served were unique to me? Searching from Facebook is powered by Bing and monetised by adcentre. What if your searches showed friends likes? If it was prioritised on collective wisdom and prioritised by my social circle wisdom (Direct network) This may lead me to make an informed decision based on my social graph. This can include reviews by my network for shopping/ restaurants.

At Bing we are pushing the envelope. Combining advertising and social. There are Rich ads in Search. we have integration of video likes. The advertising experience is embedded in the SERP and concludes with share, like, etc. features to make it more social.

Q&A